And if there were not ... if there were none ...  I hold that I should be Ba, and also your Ba ... which is ‘insolence’ ... will you say?

R.B. to E.B.B.

Thursday.
[Post-mark, February 26, 1846.]

As for the ‘third person,’ my sweet Ba, he was a wise speaker from the beginning; and in our case he will say, turning to me—­’the late Robert Hall—­when a friend admired that one with so high an estimate of the value of intellectuality in woman should yet marry some kind of cook-maid animal, as did the said Robert; wisely answered, “you can’t kiss Mind”!  May you not discover eventually,’ (this is to me) ’that mere intellectual endowments—­though incontestably of the loftiest character—­mere Mind, though that Mind be Miss B’s—­cannot be kissed—­nor, repent too late the absence of those humbler qualities, those softer affections which, like flowerets at the mountain’s foot, if not so proudly soaring as, as, as!...’ and so on, till one of us died, with laughing or being laughed at!  So judges the third person! and if, to help him, we let him into your room at Wimpole Street, suffered him to see with Flush’s eyes, he would say with just as wise an air ’True, mere personal affections may be warm enough, but does it augur well for the durability of an attachment that it should be wholly, exclusively based on such perishable attractions as the sweetness of a mouth, the beauty of an eye?  I could wish, rather, to know that there was something of less transitory nature co-existent with this—­some congeniality of Mental pursuit, some—­’ Would he not say that?  But I can’t do his platitudes justice because here is our post going out and I have been all the morning walking in the perfect joy of my heart, with your letter, and under its blessing—­dearest, dearest Ba—­let me say more to-morrow—­only this now, that you—­ah, what are you not to me!  My dearest love, bless you—­till to-morrow when I will strengthen the prayer; (no, lengthen it!)

Ever your own.

’Hawthorn’[1]—­to show how Spring gets on!

[Footnote 1:  Sprig of Hawthorn enclosed with letter.]

E.B.B. to R.B.

Thursday Evening.
[Post-mark, February 27, 1846.]

If all third persons were as foolish as this third person of yours, ever dearest, first and second persons might follow their own devices without losing much in the way of good counsel.  But you are unlucky in your third person as far as the wits go, he talks a great deal of nonsense, and Flush, who is sensible, will have nothing to do with him, he says, any more than you will with Sir Moses:—­he is quite a third person singular for the nonsense he talks!