You call me ‘kind’; and by this time I have no heart to call you such names—­I told you, did I not once? that ‘Ba’ had got to convey infinitely more of you to my sense than ‘dearest,’ ‘sweetest,’ all or any epithets that break down with their load of honey like bees—­to say you are ‘kind,’ you that so entirely and unintermittingly bless me,—­it will never do now, ‘Ba.’  All the same, one way there is to make even ‘Ba’ dearer,—­’my Ba,’ I say to myself!

About my fears—­whether of opening doors or entering people—­one thing is observable and prevents the possibility of any misconception—­I desire, have been in the habit of desiring, to increase them, far from diminishing—­they relate, of course, entirely to you—­and only through you affect me the least in the world.  Put your well-being out of the question, so far as I can understand it to be involved,—­and the pleasure and pride I should immediately choose would be that the whole world knew our position.  What pleasure, what pride!  But I endeavour to remember on all occasions—­and perhaps succeed in too few—­that it is very easy for me to go away and leave you who cannot go.  I only allude to this because some people are ‘naturally nervous’ and all that—­and I am quite of another kind.

Last evening I went out—­having been kept at home in the afternoon to see somebody ... went walking for hours.  I am quite well to-day and, now your letter comes, my Ba, most happy.  And, as the sun shines, you are perhaps making the perilous descent now, while I write—­oh, to meet you on the stairs!  And I shall really see you on Monday, dearest?  So soon, it ought to feel, considering the dreary weeks that now get to go between our days!  For music, I made myself melancholy just now with some ’Concertos for the Harpsichord by Mr. Handel’—­brought home by my father the day before yesterday;—­what were light, modern things once!  Now I read not very long ago a French memoir of ’Claude le Jeune’ called in his time the Prince of Musicians,—­no, ’Phoenix’—­the unapproachable wonder to all time—­that is, twenty years after his death about—­and to this pamphlet was prefixed as motto this startling axiom—­’In Music, the Beau Ideal changes every thirty years’—­well, is not that true?  The Idea, mind, changes—­the general standard ... so that it is no answer that a single air, such as many one knows, may strike as freshly as ever—­they were not according to the Ideal of their own time—­just now, they drop into the ready ear,—­next hundred years, who will be the Rossini? who is no longer the Rossini even I remember—­his early overtures are as purely Rococo as Cimarosa’s or more.  The sounds remain, keep their character perhaps—­the scale’s proportioned notes affect the same, that is,—­the major third, or minor seventh—­but the arrangement of these, the sequence the law—­for them, if it should change every thirty years!  To Corelli nothing seemed so conclusive in Heaven or earth as this