Believe me, therefore, dear Mr. Browning,

Faithfully yours, and gratefully,

ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

For Mr. Kenyon’s kindness, as I see it, no theory will account.  I class it with mesmerism for that reason.

R.B. to E.B.B.

New Cross, Hatcham, Monday Night.
[Post-mark, January 28, 1845.]

Dear Miss Barrett,—­Your books lie on my table here, at arm’s length from me, in this old room where I sit all day:  and when my head aches or wanders or strikes work, as it now or then will, I take my chance for either green-covered volume, as if it were so much fresh trefoil to feel in one’s hands this winter-time,—­and round I turn, and, putting a decisive elbow on three or four half-done-with ‘Bells’ of mine, read, read, read, and just as I have shut up the book and walked to the window, I recollect that you wanted me to find faults there, and that, in an unwise hour, I engaged to do so.  Meantime, the days go by (the whitethroat is come and sings now) and as I would not have you ‘look down on me from your white heights’ as promise breaker, evader, or forgetter, if I could help:  and as, if I am very candid and contrite, you may find it in your heart to write to me again—­who knows?—­I shall say at once that the said faults cannot be lost, must be somewhere, and shall be faithfully brought you back whenever they turn up,—­as people tell one of missing matters.  I am rather exacting, myself, with my own gentle audience, and get to say spiteful things about them when they are backward in their dues of appreciation—­but really, really—­could I be quite sure that anybody as good as—­I must go on, I suppose, and say—­as myself, even, were honestly to feel towards me as I do, towards the writer of ‘Bertha,’ and the ‘Drama,’ and the ‘Duchess,’ and the ‘Page’ and—­the whole two volumes, I should be paid after a fashion, I know.

One thing I can do—­pencil, if you like, and annotate, and dissertate upon that I love most and least—­I think I can do it, that is.

Here an odd memory comes—­of a friend who,—­volunteering such a service to a sonnet-writing somebody, gave him a taste of his quality in a side-column of short criticisms on sonnet the First, and starting off the beginning three lines with, of course, ’bad, worse, worst’—­made by a generous mintage of words to meet the sudden run of his epithets, ‘worser, worserer, worserest’ pay off the second terzet in full—­no ‘badder, badderer, badderest’ fell to the Second’s allowance, and ‘worser’ &c. answered the demands of the Third; ‘worster, worsterer, worsterest’ supplied the emergency of the Fourth; and, bestowing his last ‘worserestest and worstestest’ on lines 13 and 14, my friend (slapping his forehead like an emptied strong-box) frankly declared himself bankrupt, and honourably incompetent, to satisfy the reasonable expectations of the rest of the series!

What an illustration of the law by which opposite ideas suggest opposite, and contrary images come together!