It does certainly appear wonderful that we should not sufficiently stand abreast here in Europe, to justify and necessitate the establishment of an European review—­journal rather—­(the ‘Foreign Review,’ so called, touching only the summits of the hills) a journal which might be on a level with the intelligent readers of all the countries of Europe, and take all the rising reputations of each, with the national light on them as they rise, into observation and judgment.  If nobody can do this, it is a pity I think to do so much less—­both in France and England—­to snatch up a French book from over the Channel as ever and anon they do in the Athenaeum, and say something prodigiously absurd of it, till people cry out ‘oh oh’ as in the House of Commons.

Oh—­oh—­and how wise I am to-day, as if I were a critic myself!  Yesterday I was foolish instead—­for I couldn’t get out of my head all the evening how you said that you would come ’to see a candle held up at the window.’  Well! but I do not mean to love you any more just now—­so I tell you plainly.  Certainly I will not.  I love you already too much perhaps.  I feel like the turning Dervishes turning in the sun when you say such words to me—­and I never shall love you any ‘less,’ because it is too much to be made less of.

And you write to-morrow? and will tell me how you are? honestly will tell me?  May God bless you, most dear!

I am yours—­’Tota tua est’

BA.

R.B. to E.B.B.

Sunday.
[Post-mark, March 16, 1846.]

How will the love my heart is full of for you, let me be silent?  Insufficient speech is better than no speech, in one regard—­the speaker had tried words, and if they fail, hereafter he needs not reflect that he did not even try—­so with me now, that loving you, Ba, with all my heart and soul, all my senses being lost in one wide wondering gratitude and veneration, I press close to you to say so, in this imperfect way, my dear dearest beloved!  Why do you not help me, rather than take my words, my proper word, from me and call them yours, when yours they are not?  You said lately love of you ’made you humble’—­just as if to hinder me from saying that earnest truth!—­entirely true it is, as I feel ever more convincingly.  You do not choose to understand it should be so, nor do I much care, for the one thing you must believe, must resolve to believe in its length and breadth, is that I do love you and live only in the love of you.

I will rest on the confidence that you do so believe!  You know by this that it is no shadowy image of you and not you, which having attached myself to in the first instance, I afterward compelled my fancy to see reproduced, so to speak, with tolerable exactness to the original idea, in you, the dearest real you I am blessed with—­you know what the eyes are to me, and the lips and the hair.  And I, for my part, know now, while fresh from