For the rest, we have, neither of us, seen the book yet, nor even read an exact copy of the words in question.  Only the rumour of them appears to run that I am ‘not likely ever to see you.’  And why am I never to see you, pray?  Unlikelier pleasures have been granted to me, and I will not indeed lose hold of the hope of this pleasure.

Allow it to

Your always obliged
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

* * * * *

To Miss Mitford

[Paris,] 138 Avenue des Champs-Elysees:  [January-February 1852].

My very dear friend, let me begin what I have to say by recognising you as the most generous and affectionate of friends.  I never could mistake the least of your intentions; you were always, from first to last, kind and tenderly indulgent to me—­always exaggerating what was good in me, always forgetting what was faulty and weak—­keeping me by force of affection in a higher place than I could aspire to by force of vanity; loving me always, in fact.  Now let me tell you the truth.  It will prove how hard it is for the tenderest friends to help paining one another, since you have pained me.  See what a deep wound I must have in me, to be pained by the touch of such a hand.  Oh, I am morbid, I very well know.  But the truth is that I have been miserably upset by your book, and that if I had had the least imagination of your intending to touch upon certain biographical details in relation to me, I would have conjured you by your love to me and by my love to you, to forbear it altogether.  You cannot understand; no, you cannot understand with all your wide sympathy (perhaps, because you are not morbid, and I am), the sort of susceptibility I have upon one subject.  I have lived heart to heart (for instance) with my husband these five years:  I have never yet spoken out, in a whisper even, what is in me; never yet could find heart or breath; never yet could bear to hear a word of reference from his lips.  And now those dreadful words are going the round of the newspapers, to be verified here, commented on there, gossiped about everywhere; and I, for my part, am frightened to look at a paper as a child in the dark—­as unreasonably, you will say—­but what then? what drives us mad is our unreason.  I will tell you how it was.  First of all, an English acquaintance here told us that she had been hearing a lecture at the College de France, and that the professor, M. Philaret Chasles, in the introduction to a series of lectures on English poetry, had expressed his intention of noticing Tennyson, Browning, &c., and E.B.B.—­’from whose private life the veil had been raised in so interesting a manner lately by Miss Mitford.’  In the midst of my anxiety about this, up comes a writer of the ‘Revue des Deux Mondes’ to my husband, to say that he was preparing a review upon me and had been directed by the editor to make use of some biographical details extracted from your book into the ‘Athenaeum,’