s of poetry, it is not and cannot be so.

The consequence is, that he is not read except in a peculiar circle
very strait and narrow. He will not die, because the principle of
life is in him, but he will not live the warm summer life which is
permitted to many of very inferior faculty, because he does not come
out into the sun.

Faithfully your friend,
E.B. BARRETT.

[Footnote 134: Hood died on May 3, 1845; while on his deathbed he
received from Sir Robert Peel the notification that he had conferred
on him a pension of 100L a year, with remainder to his wife.]

The following letter relates to the controversy raging round Miss
Martineau and her mesmerism. Miss Barrett had evidently referred to it
in a letter to Mr. Chorley, which has not been preserved.

_To Mr. Chorley_
50 Wimpole Street: April 28, 1845.

Dear Mr. Chorley,--I felt quite sure that you would take my postscript
for a womanish thing, and a little doubtful whether you would not
take the whole allusion (in or out of a postscript) for an impertinent
thing; but the impulse to speak was stronger than the fear of
speaking; and from the peculiarities of my position, I have come to
write by impulses just as other people talk by them. Still, if I had
known that the subject was so painful to you, I certainly would not
have touched on it, strong as my feeling has been about it, and full
and undeniable as is my sympathy with our noble-minded friend, both as
a woman and a thinker. Not that I consider (of course I cannot) that
she has made out anything like a '_fact_' in the Tynemouth story--not
that I think the evidence offered in any sort sufficient; take it as
it was in the beginning and unimpugned--not that I have been otherwise
than of opinion throughout that she was precipitate and indiscreet,
however generously so, in her mode and time of advocating the mesmeric
question; but that she is at liberty as a thinking being (in my mind)
to hold an opinion, the grounds of which she cannot yet justify to
the world. Do you not think she may be? Have you not opinions yourself
beyond what you can prove to others? Have we not all? And because some
of the links of the outer chain of a logical argument fail, or seem to
fail, are we therefore to have our 'honours' questioned, because we
do not yield what is suspended to an inner uninjured chain of at once
subtler and stronger formation? For what I venture to object to in the
argument of the 'Athenaeum' is the making