of your kindness;
and _truth_ must be sacred to all of us, whether we have to suffer
or be glad by it. As for Mr. Horne, I cannot answer for what he has
received or not received. I had one note from him on silver paper
(fear of postage having reduced him to a transparency) from Germany,
and that is all, and I did not think him in good spirits in what he
said of himself. I will tell him what you have the goodness to say,
and something, too, on my own part. He has had a hard time of it with
his 'Spirit of the Age;' the attacks on the book here being bitter in
the extreme. Your 'Democratic' does not comfort him for the rest, by
the way, and, indeed, he is almost past comfort on the subject. I had
a letter the other day from Dr. Shelton Mackenzie, whom I do not know
personally, but who is about to publish a 'Living Author Dictionary,'
and who, by some association, talked of the effeminacy of 'the
American poets,' so I begged him to read your poems on 'Man' and
prepare an exception to his position. I wish to write more and must
not.

Most faithfully yours,
E.B.B.

Am I the first with the great and good news for America and England
that Harriet Martineau is better and likely to be better? She told me
so herself, and attributes the change to the agency of _mesmerism_.

_To H.S. Boyd_
October 4, 1844.

My dearest Mr. Boyd,--... As to 'The Lost Bower,' I am penitent about
having caused you so much disturbance. I sometimes fancy that a little
varying of the accents, though at the obvious expense of injuring
the smoothness of every line considered separately, gives variety
of cadence and fuller harmony to the general effect. But I do not
question that I deserve a great deal of blame on this point as on
others. Many lines in 'Isobel's Child' are very slovenly and weak from
a multitude of causes. I hope you will like 'The Lost Bower' better
when you try it again than you did at first, though I do not, of
course, expect that you will not see much to cry out against. The
subject of the poem was an actual fact of my childhood.

Oh, and I think I told you, when giving you the history of 'Lady
Geraldine's Courtship,' that I wrote the _thirteen_ last pages of it
in one day. I ought to have said _nineteen_ pages instead. But don't
tell anybody; only keep the circumstance in your mind when you need it
and see the faults. Nobody knows of it except you and Mr. Kenyon and
my own family for the reason I told you. I sent off that poem