See now, how, of that ‘Friendship’ you offer me (and here Juliet’s word rises to my lips)—­I feel sure once and for ever.  I have got already, I see, into this little pet-handwriting of mine (not anyone else’s) which scratches on as if theatrical copyists (ah me!) and BRADBURY AND EVANS’ READER were not!  But you shall get something better than this nonsense one day, if you will have patience with me—­hardly better, though, because this does me real good, gives real relief, to write.  After all, you know nothing, next to nothing of me, and that stops me.  Spring is to come, however!

If you hate writing to me as I hate writing to nearly everybody, I pray you never write—­if you do, as you say, care for anything I have done.  I will simply assure you, that meaning to begin work in deep earnest, begin without affectation, God knows,—­I do not know what will help me more than hearing from you,—­and therefore, if you do not so very much hate it, I know I shall hear from you—­and very little more about your ‘tiring me.’

Ever yours faithfully,

ROBERT BROWNING.

E.B.B. to R.B.

50 Walpole Street:  Feb. 3, 1845.
[Transcriber’s Note:  So in original.  Should be “Wimpole Street.”]

Why how could I hate to write to you, dear Mr. Browning?  Could you believe in such a thing?  If nobody likes writing to everybody (except such professional letter writers as you and I are not), yet everybody likes writing to somebody, and it would be strange and contradictory if I were not always delighted both to hear from you and to write to you, this talking upon paper being as good a social pleasure as another, when our means are somewhat straitened.  As for me, I have done most of my talking by post of late years—­as people shut up in dungeons take up with scrawling mottoes on the walls.  Not that I write to many in the way of regular correspondence, as our friend Mr. Horne predicates of me in his romances (which is mere romancing!), but that there are a few who will write and be written to by me without a sense of injury.  Dear Miss Mitford, for instance.  You do not know her, I think, personally, although she was the first to tell me (when I was very ill and insensible to all the glories of the world except poetry), of the grand scene in ‘Pippa Passes.’ She has filled a large drawer in this room with delightful letters, heart-warm and soul-warm, ... driftings of nature (if sunshine could drift like snow), and which, if they should ever fall the way of all writing, into print, would assume the folio shape as a matter of course, and take rank on the lowest shelf of libraries, with Benedictine editions of the Fathers, [Greek:  k.t.l.].  I write this to you to show how I can have pleasure in letters, and never think them too long, nor too frequent, nor too illegible from being written in little ‘pet hands.’  I can read any MS. except the writing on the pyramids.  And if you will only promise