to treat me en bon camarade, without reference to the conventionalities of ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ taking no thought for your sentences (nor for mine), nor for your blots (nor for mine), nor for your blunt speaking (nor for mine), nor for your badd speling (nor for mine), and if you agree to send me a blotted thought whenever you are in the mind for it, and with as little ceremony and less legibility than you would think it necessary to employ towards your printer—­why, then, I am ready to sign and seal the contract, and to rejoice in being ‘articled’ as your correspondent.  Only don’t let us have any constraint, any ceremony! Don’t be civil to me when you feel rude,—­nor loquacious when you incline to silence,—­nor yielding in the manners when you are perverse in the mind.  See how out of the world I am!  Suffer me to profit by it in almost the only profitable circumstance, and let us rest from the bowing and the courtesying, you and I, on each side.  You will find me an honest man on the whole, if rather hasty and prejudging, which is a different thing from prejudice at the worst.  And we have great sympathies in common, and I am inclined to look up to you in many things, and to learn as much of everything as you will teach me.  On the other hand you must prepare yourself to forbear and to forgive—­will you?  While I throw off the ceremony, I hold the faster to the kindness.

Is it true, as you say, that I ‘know so “little"’ of you?  And is it true, as others say, that the productions of an artist do not partake of his real nature, ... that in the minor sense, man is not made in the image of God?  It is not true, to my mind—­and therefore it is not true that I know little of you, except in as far as it is true (which I believe) that your greatest works are to come.  Need I assure you that I shall always hear with the deepest interest every word you will say to me of what you are doing or about to do?  I hear of the ‘old room’ and the ‘"Bells” lying about,’ with an interest which you may guess at, perhaps.  And when you tell me besides, of my poems being there, and of your caring for them so much beyond the tide-mark of my hopes, the pleasure rounds itself into a charm, and prevents its own expression.  Overjoyed I am with this cordial sympathy—­but it is better, I feel, to try to justify it by future work than to thank you for it now.  I think—­if I may dare to name myself with you in the poetic relation—­that we both have high views of the Art we follow, and stedfast purpose in the pursuit of it, and that we should not, either of us, be likely to be thrown from the course, by the casting of any Atalanta-ball of speedy popularity.  But I do not know, I cannot guess, whether you are liable to be pained deeply by hard criticism and cold neglect, such as original writers like yourself are too often exposed to—­or whether the love of Art is enough for you, and the exercise of Art the filling joy of your life.