If ever I am in the Sistine Chapel, it will not be with Mrs. Jameson—­no.  If ever I should be there, what teaching I shall want, I who have seen so few pictures, and love them only as children do, with an unlearned love, just for the sake of the thoughts they bring.  Wonderfully ignorant I am, to have had eyes and ears so long!  There is music, now, which lifts the hair on my head, I feel it so much, ... yet all I know of it as art, all I have heard of the works of the masters in it, has been the mere sign and suggestion, such as the private piano may give.  I never heard an oratorio, for instance, in my life—­judge by that!  It is a guess, I make, at all the greatness and divinity ... feeling in it, though, distinctly and certainly, that a composer like Beethoven must stand above the divinest painter in soul-godhead, and nearest to the true poet, of all artists.  And this I felt in my guess, long before I knew you.  But observe how, if I had died in this illness, I should have left a sealed world behind me! you, unknown too—­unguessed at, you, ... in many respects, wonderfully unguessed at!  Lately I have learnt to despise my own instincts.  And apart from those—­and you, ... it was right for me to be melancholy, in the consciousness of passing blindfolded under all the world-stars, and of going out into another side of the creation, with a blank for the experience of this ... the last revelation, unread!  How the thought of it used to depress me sometimes!

Talking of music, I had a proposition the other day from certain of Mr. Russell’s (the singer’s) friends, about his setting to music my ‘Cry of the Children.’  His programme exhibits all the horrors of the world, I see!  Lifeboats ... madhouses ... gamblers’ wives ... all done to the right sort of moaning.  His audiences must go home delightfully miserable, I should fancy.  He has set the ‘Song of the Shirt’ ... and my ‘Cry of the Children’ will be acceptable, it is supposed, as a climax of agony.  Do you know this Mr. Russell, and what sort of music he suits to his melancholy?  But to turn my ‘Cry’ to a ‘Song,’ a burden, it is said, is required—­he can’t sing it without a burden! and behold what has been sent ’for my approval’....  I shall copy it verbatim for you....

    And the threads twirl, twirl, twirl,
        Before each boy and girl;
    And the wheels, big and little, still whirl, whirl, whirl.

... accompaniment agitato, imitating the roar of the machinery!

This is not endurable ... ought not to be ... should it now?  Do tell me.

May God bless you, very dearest!  Let me hear how you are—­and think how I am

Your own....

R.B. to E.B.B.

[Post-mark, March 2, 1846.]

Dearest, I have been kept in town and just return in time to say why you have no note ... to-morrow I will write ... so much there is to say on the subject of this letter I find.