I had much to say to you, or at least something, of the ‘blind hopes’ &c., but am ashamed to take a step into a new sheet.  If you mean ’to travel,’ why, I shall have to miss you.  Do you really mean it?  How is the play going on? and the poem?

May God bless you!

Ever and truly yours,

E.B.B.

R.B. to E.B.B.

Monday Morning.
[Post-mark, March 31, 1845.]

When you read Don Quixote, my dear romance-reader, do you ever notice that flower of an incident of good fellowship where the friendly Squire of Him of the Moon, or the Looking glasses, (I forget which) passes to Sancho’s dry lips, (all under a cork-tree one morning)—­a plump wine-skin,—­and do you admire dear brave Miguel’s knowledge of thirsty nature when he tells you that the Drinker, having seriously considered for a space the Pleiads, or place where they should be, fell, as he slowly returned the shrivelled bottle to its donor, into a deep musing of an hour’s length, or thereabouts, and then ... mark ... only then, fetching a profound sigh, broke silence with ... such a piece of praise as turns pale the labours in that way of Rabelais and the Teian (if he wasn’t a Byzantine monk, alas!) and our Mr. Kenyon’s stately self—­(since my own especial poet a moi, that can do all with anybody, only ‘sips like a fly,’ she says, and so cares not to compete with these behemoths that drink up Jordan)—­Well, then ... (oh, I must get quick to the sentence’s end, and be brief as an oracle-explainer!)—­the giver is you and the taker is I, and the letter is the wine, and the star-gazing is the reading the same, and the brown study is—­how shall I deserve and be grateful enough to this new strange friend of my own, that has taken away my reproach among men, that have each and all their friend, so they say (... not that I believe all they say—­they boast too soon sometimes, no doubt,—­I once was shown a letter wherein the truth stumbled out after this fashion ’Dere Smith,—­I calls you “dere” ... because you are so in your shop!’)—­and the great sigh is,—­there is no deserving nor being grateful at all,—­and the breaking silence is, and the praise is ... ah, there, enough of it!  This sunny morning is as if I wished it for you—­10 strikes by the clock now—­tell me if at 10 this morning you feel any good from my heart’s wishes for you—­I would give you all you want out of my own life and gladness and yet keep twice the stock that should by right have sufficed the thin white face that is laughing at me in the glass yonder at the fancy of its making anyone afraid ... and now, with another kind of laugh, at the thought that when its owner ‘travels’ next, he will leave off Miss Barrett along with port wine—­Dii meliora piis, and, among them to

Yours every where, and at all times yours

R. BROWNING.

I have all to say yet—­next letter.  R.B.

R.B. to E.B.B.