to E.B.B._

New Cross, Hatcham, Monday Night.
[Post-mark, January 28, 1845.]

Dear Miss Barrett,--Your books lie on my table here, at arm's length
from me, in this old room where I sit all day: and when my head aches
or wanders or strikes work, as it now or then will, I take my chance
for either green-covered volume, as if it were so much fresh trefoil
to feel in one's hands this winter-time,--and round I turn, and,
putting a decisive elbow on three or four half-done-with 'Bells' of
mine, read, read, read, and just as I have shut up the book and walked
to the window, I recollect that you wanted me to find faults there,
and that, in an unwise hour, I engaged to do so. Meantime, the days
go by (the whitethroat is come and sings now) and as I would not have
you 'look down on me from your white heights' as promise breaker,
evader, or forgetter, if I could help: and as, if I am very candid and
contrite, you may find it in your heart to write to me again--who
knows?--I shall say at once that the said faults cannot be lost, must
be _somewhere_, and shall be faithfully brought you back whenever they
turn up,--as people tell one of missing matters. I am rather exacting,
myself, with my own gentle audience, and get to say spiteful things
about them when they are backward in their dues of appreciation--but
really, _really_--could I be quite sure that anybody as good as--I
must go on, I suppose, and say--as myself, even, were honestly to feel
towards me as I do, towards the writer of 'Bertha,' and the 'Drama,'
and the 'Duchess,' and the 'Page' and--the whole two volumes, I should
be paid after a fashion, I know.

One thing I can do--pencil, if you like, and annotate, and dissertate
upon that I love most and least--I think I can do it, that is.

Here an odd memory comes--of a friend who,--volunteering such a
service to a sonnet-writing somebody, gave him a taste of his quality
in a side-column of short criticisms on sonnet the First, and starting
off the beginning three lines with, of course, 'bad, worse,
worst'--made by a generous mintage of words to meet the sudden run of
his epithets, 'worser, worserer, worserest' pay off the second terzet
in full--no 'badder, badderer, badderest' fell to the _Second's_
allowance, and 'worser' &c. answered the demands of the Third;
'worster, worsterer, worsterest' supplied the emergency of the Fourth;
and, bestowing his last 'worserestest