s much as I can find and make room for, 'Brown
Rosary' and all. I am glad you liked 'Napoleon,'[89] but I shall be
more glad if you decide when you see this new book that I have made
some general progress in strength and expression. Sometimes I rise
into hoping that I may have done so, or may do so still more.

The poet's work is no light work. His wheat will not grow without
labour any more than other kinds of wheat, and the sweat of the
spirit's brow is wrung by a yet harder necessity. And, thinking so, I
am inclined to a little regret that you should have hastened your book
even for the sake of a sentiment. Now you will be angry with me....

There are certain difficulties in the way of the critic
unprofessional, as I know by experience. Our most sweet voices
are scarcely admissible among the most sour ones of the regular
brotherhood....

Harriet Martineau is quite well,'trudging miles together in the snow,'
when the snow was, and in great spirits. Wordsworth is to be in London
in the spring. Tennyson is dancing the polka and smoking cloud upon
cloud at Cheltenham. Robert Browning is meditating a new poem, and an
excursion on the Continent. Miss Mitford came to spend a day with me
some ten days ago; sprinkled, as to the soul, with meadow dews. Am I
at the end of my account? I think so.

Did you read 'Blackwood'? and in that case have you had deep delight
in an exquisite paper by the Opium-eater, which my heart trembled
through from end to end? What a poet that man is! how he vivifies
words, or deepens them, and gives them profound significance....

I understand that poor Hood is supposed to be dying, really dying, at
last. Sydney Smith's last laugh mixes with his, or nearly so. But
Hood had a deeper heart, in one sense, than Sydney Smith, and is the
material of a greater man.

And what are you doing? Writing--reading--or musing of either? Are you
a reviewer-man--in opposition to the writer? Once, reviewing was my
besetting sin, but now it is only my frailty. Now that I lie here
at the mercy of every reviewer, I save myself by an instinct of
self-preservation from that 'gnawing tooth' (as Homer and Aeschylus
did rightly call it), and spring forward into definite work and
thought. Else, I should perish. Do you understand that? If you are a
reviewer-man you will, and if not, you must set it down among those
mysteries of mine which people talk of as profane.

May God bless you, &c. &c.
ELIZABETH BARRETT.

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