Yet one thing will fetter it worse, only one thing—­if you, in any respect, stay behind?  You that in all else help me and will help me, beyond words—­beyond dreams—­if, because I find you, your own works stop—­’then comes the Selah and the voice is hushed.’  Oh, no, no, dearest, so would the help cease to be help—­the joy to be joy, Ba herself to be quite Ba, and my own Siren singing song for song.  Dear love, will that be kind, and right, and like the rest?  Write and promise that all shall be resumed, the romance-poem chiefly, and I will try and feel more yours than ever now.  Am I not with you in the world, proud of you—­and vain, too, very likely, which is all the sweeter if it is a sin as you teach me.  Indeed dearest, I have set my heart on your fulfilling your mission—­my heart is on it!  Bless you, my Ba—­

Your R.B.

I am so well as to have resumed the shower-bath (this morning)—­and I walk, especially near the elms and stile—­and mean to walk, and be very well—­and you, dearest?

E.B.B. to R.B.

[Post-mark, February 26, 1846.]

I confess that while I was writing those words I had a thought that they were not quite yours as you said them.  Still it comes to something in their likeness, but we will not talk of it and break off the chrystals—­they are so brittle, then? do you know that by an ‘instinct.’  But I agree that it is best not to talk—­I ‘gave it up’ as a riddle long ago.  Let there be ‘analysis’ even, and it will not be solution.  I have my own thoughts of course, and you have yours, and the worst is that a third person looking down on us from some snow-capped height, and free from personal influences, would have his thoughts too, and he would think that if you had been reasonable as usual you would have gone to Italy.  I have by heart (or by head at least) what the third person would think.  The third person thundered to me in an abstraction for ever so long, and at intervals I hear him still, only you shall not to-day, because he talks ’damnable iterations’ and teazes you.  Nay, the first person is teazing you now perhaps, without going any further, and yet I must go a little further, just to say (after accepting all possible unlikelinesses and miracles, because everything was miraculous and impossible) that it was agreed between us long since that you did not love me for anything—­your having no reason for it is the only way of your not seeming unreasonable.  Also for my own sake.  I like it to be so—­I cannot have peace with the least change from it.  Dearest, take the baron’s hawthorn bough which, in spite of his fine dream of it is dead since the other day, and so much the worse than when I despised it last—­take that dead stick and push it upright into the sand as the tide rises, and the whole blue sea draws up its glittering breadth and length towards and around it.  But what then?  What does that prove? ... as the philosopher said of the poem.  So we ought not to talk of such things; and we get warned off even in the accidental illustrations taken up to light us.  Still, the stick certainly did not draw the sea.