How delightful to talk about oneself; but as you ’tempted me and I did eat,’ I entreat your longsuffering of my sin, and ah! if you would but sin back so in turn!  You and I seem to meet in a mild contrarious harmony ... as in the ‘si no, si no’ of an Italian duet.  I want to see more of men, and you have seen too much, you say.  I am in ignorance, and you, in satiety.  ‘You don’t even care about reading now.’  Is it possible?  And I am as ‘fresh’ about reading, as ever I was—­as long as I keep out of the shadow of the dictionaries and of theological controversies, and the like.  Shall I whisper it to you under the memory of the last rose of last summer? I am very fond of romances; yes! and I read them not only as some wise people are known to do, for the sake of the eloquence here and the sentiment there, and the graphic intermixtures here and there, but for the story! just as little children would, sitting on their papa’s knee.  My childish love of a story never wore out with my love of plum cake, and now there is not a hole in it.  I make it a rule, for the most part, to read all the romances that other people are kind enough to write—­and woe to the miserable wight who tells me how the third volume endeth.  Have you in you any surviving innocence of this sort? or do you call it idiocy?  If you do, I will forgive you, only smiling to myself—­I give you notice,—­with a smile of superior pleasure!  Mr. Chorley made me quite laugh the other day by recommending Mary Hewitt’s ‘Improvisatore,’ with a sort of deprecating reference to the descriptions in the book, just as if I never read a novel—­I! I wrote a confession back to him which made him shake his head perhaps, and now I confess to you, unprovoked.  I am one who could have forgotten the plague, listening to Boccaccio’s stories; and I am not ashamed of it.  I do not even ‘see the better part,’ I am so silly.

Ah! you tempt me with a grand vision of Prometheus! I, who have just escaped with my life, after treading Milton’s ground, you would send me to AEschylus’s.  No, I do not dare.  And besides ...  I am inclined to think that we want new forms, as well as thoughts.  The old gods are dethroned.  Why should we go back to the antique moulds, classical moulds, as they are so improperly called?  If it is a necessity of Art to do so, why then those critics are right who hold that Art is exhausted and the world too worn out for poetry.  I do not, for my part, believe this:  and I believe the so-called necessity of Art to be the mere feebleness of the artist.  Let us all aspire rather to Life, and let the dead bury their dead.  If we have but courage to face these conventions, to touch this low ground, we shall take strength from it instead of losing it; and of that, I am intimately persuaded.  For there is poetry everywhere; the ‘treasure’ (see the old fable) lies all over the field.  And then Christianity is a worthy myth, and poetically acceptable.