st--which happened--and the answer to
_that_, you received on Friday night, did you not? I had to go to
Holborn, of all places,--not to pluck strawberries in the Bishop's
Garden like Richard Crouchback, but to get a book--and there I carried
my note, thinking to expedite its delivery: this notelet of yours,
quite as little in its kind as my blue flowers,--this came last
evening--and here are my thanks, dear E.B.B.--dear friend.

In the former note there is a phrase I must not forget to call on you
to account for--that where it confesses to having done 'some
work--only nothing worth speaking of.' Just see,--will you be first
and only compact-breaker? Nor misunderstand me here, please, ... as I
said, I am quite rejoiced that you go out now, 'walk about' now, and
put off the writing that will follow thrice as abundantly, all because
of the stopping to gather strength ... so I want no new word, not to
say poem, not to say the romance-poem--let the 'finches in the
shrubberies grow restless in the dark'--_I_ am inside with the lights
and music: but what is done, is done, _pas vrai_? And 'worth' is, dear
my friend, pardon me, not in your arbitration quite.

Let me tell you an odd thing that happened at Chorley's the other
night. I must have mentioned to you that I forget my own verses so
surely after they are once on paper, that I ought, without
affectation, to mend them infinitely better, able as I am to bring
fresh eyes to bear on them--(when I say 'once on paper' that is just
what I mean and no more, for after the sad revising begins they do
leave their mark, distinctly or less so according to circumstances).
Well, Miss Cushman, the new American actress (clever and
truthful-looking) was talking of a new novel by the Dane Andersen, he
of the 'Improvisatore,' which will reach us, it should seem, in
translation, _via_ America--she had looked over two or three proofs of
the work in the press, and Chorley was anxious to know something about
its character. The title, she said, was capital--'Only a
Fiddler!'--and she enlarged on that word, 'Only,' and its
significance, so put: and I quite agreed with her for several minutes,
till first one reminiscence flitted to me, then another and at last I
was obliged to stop my praises and say 'but, now I think of it, _I_
seem to have written something with a similar title--nay, a play, I
believe--yes, and in five acts--'Only an Actress'--and from that
time, some two years or more ago to th