on an inverted wine-cooler, proceeded to read the following brief remarks upon the characteristics of the Moeso-gothic literature’—­this ends the page,—­which you don’t turn at once!  But when you do, in bitterness of soul, turn it, you read—­’On consideration, I’ (Ben, himself) ’shall keep them for Mr. Colburn’s New Magazine’—­and deeply you draw thankful breath! (Note this ‘parallel case’ of mine is pretty sure to meet the usual fortune of my writings—­you will ask what it means—­and this it means, or should mean, all of it, instance and reasoning and all,—­that I am naturally earnest, in earnest about whatever thing I do, and little able to write about one thing while I think of another)—­

I think I will really write verse to you some day—­this day, it is quite clear I had better give up trying.

No, spite of all the lines in the world, I will make an end of it, as Ophelia with her swan’s-song,—­for it grows too absurd.  But remember that I write letters to nobody but you, and that I want method and much more.  That book you like so, the Danish novel, must be full of truth and beauty, to judge from the few extracts I have seen in Reviews.  That a Dane should write so, confirms me in an old belief—­that Italy is stuff for the use of the North, and no more—­pure Poetry there is none, nearly as possible none, in Dante even—­material for Poetry in the pitifullest romancist of their thousands, on the contrary—­strange that those great wide black eyes should stare nothing out of the earth that lies before them!  Alfieri, with even grey eyes, and a life of travel, writes you some fifteen tragedies as colourless as salad grown under a garden glass with matting over it—­as free, that is, from local colouring, touches of the soil they are said to spring from,—­think of ‘Saulle,’ and his Greek attempts!

I expected to see Mr. Kenyon, at a place where I was last week, but he kept away.  Here is the bad wind back again, and the black sky.  I am sure I never knew till now whether the East or West or South were the quarter to pray for—­But surely the weather was a little better last week, and you, were you not better?  And do you know—­but it’s all self-flattery I believe,—­still I cannot help fancying the East wind does my head harm too!

Ever yours faithfully,

R. BROWNING.

E.B.B. to R.B.

Thursday.
[Post-mark, May 2, 1845.]

People say of you and of me, dear Mr. Browning, that we love the darkness and use a sphinxine idiom in our talk; and really you do talk a little like a sphinx in your argument drawn from ‘Vivian Grey.’  Once I sate up all night to read ‘Vivian Grey’; but I never drew such an argument from him.  Not that I give it up (nor you up) for a mere mystery.  Nor that I can ‘see what you have got in you,’ from a mere guess.  But just observe!  If I ask questions about novels, is it not because I want to know how much elbow-room there may be for our