t, I am afraid--but I never knew how to be prudent--and then,
there is not a sharing of responsibility in any sort of imaginable
measure; but a mere going away of so many thoughts, apart from the
thinker, or of words, apart from the speaker, ... just as I might give
away a pocket-handkerchief to be newly marked and mine no longer. I
did not do--and would not have done, ... one of those papers singly.
It would have been unbecoming of me in every way. It was simply a
writing of notes ... of slips of paper ... now on one subject, and now
on another ... which were thrown into the great cauldron and boiled up
with other matter, and re-translated from my idiom where there seemed
a need for it. And I am not much afraid of being ever guessed
at--except by those Oedipuses who astounded me once for a moment and
were after all, I hope, baffled by the Sphinx--or ever betrayed;
because besides the black Stygian oaths and indubitable honour of the
editor, he has some interest, even as I have the greatest, in being
silent and secret. And nothing _is mine_ ... if something is _of me_
... or _from_ me, rather. Yet it was wrong and foolish, I see
plainly--wrong in all but the motives. How dreadful to write against
time, and with a side-ways running conscience! And then the literature
of the day was wider than his knowledge, all round! And the
booksellers were barking distraction on every side!--I had some of the
mottos to find too! But the paper relating to you I never was
consulted about--or in _one particular way_ it would have been
better,--as easily it might have been. May God bless you, my dear
friend,

E.B.B.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Friday Morning.
[Post-mark, July 25, 1845.]

You would let me _now_, I dare say, call myself grateful to you--yet
such is my jealousy in these matters--so do I hate the material when
it puts down, (or tries) the immaterial in the offices of friendship;
that I could almost tell you I was _not_ grateful, and try if that way
I could make you see the substantiality of those other favours you
refuse to recognise, and reality of the other gratitude you will not
admit. But truth is truth, and you are all generosity, and will draw
none but the fair inference, so I thank you as well as I can for this
_also_--this last kindness. And you know its value, too--how if there
were another _you_ in