[Illustration:  Music]

I don’t believe there is one of his sonatas wherein that formula does not do duty.  In these things of Handel that seems replaced by

[Illustration:  Music]

—­that was the only true consummation!  Then,—­to go over the hundred years,—­came Rossini’s unanswerable coda: 

[Illustration:  Music]

which serves as base to the infinity of songs, gone, gone—­so gone by!  From all of which Ba draws this ‘conclusion’ that these may be worse things than Bartoli’s Tuscan to cover a page with!—­yet, yet the pity of it!  Le Jeune, the Phoenix, and Rossini who directed his letters to his mother as ’mother of the famous composer’—­and Henry Lawes, and Dowland’s Lute, ah me!

Well, my conclusion is the best, the everlasting, here and I trust elsewhere—­I am your own, my Ba, ever your

R.

E.B.B. to R.B.

Tuesday Morning.
[Post-mark, March 10, 1846.]

Now I shall know what to believe when you talk of very bad and very indifferent doings of yours.  Dearest, I read your ‘Soul’s Tragedy’ last night and was quite possessed with it, and fell finally into a mute wonder how you could for a moment doubt about publishing it.  It is very vivid, I think, and vital, and impressed me more than the first act of ‘Luria’ did, though I do not mean to compare such dissimilar things, and for pure nobleness ‘Luria’ is unapproachable—­will prove so, it seems to me.  But this ‘Tragedy’ shows more heat from the first, and then, the words beat down more closely ... well!  I am struck by it all as you see.  If you keep it up to this passion, if you justify this high key-note, it is a great work, and worthy of a place next ‘Luria.’  Also do observe how excellently balanced the two will be, and how the tongue of this next silver Bell will swing from side to side.  And you to frighten me about it.  Yes, and the worst is (because it was stupid in me) the worst is that I half believed you and took the manuscript to be something inferior—­for you—­and the adviseableness of its publication, a doubtful case.  And yet, after all, the really worst is, that you should prove yourself such an adept at deceiving!  For can it be possible that the same

     ‘Robert Browning’

who (I heard the other day) said once that he could ’wait three hundred years,’ should not feel the life of centuries in this work too—­can it be?  Why all the pulses of the life of it are beating in even my ears!

Tell me, beloved, how you are—­I shall hear it to-night—­shall I not?  To think of your being unwell, and forced to go here and go there to visit people to whom your being unwell falls in at best among the secondary evils!—­makes me discontented—­which is one shade more to the uneasiness I feel.  Will you take care, and not give away your life to these people?  Because I have a better claim than they ... and shall