and find all safe, find the comfort of you, the
traces of you ... _will_ it do--tell me--to trust all that as a light
effort, an easy matter?

Yet, if you can lift me with one hand, while the other suffices to
crown you--there is queenliness in _that_, too!

Well, I have spoken. As I told you, your turn comes now. How have you
determined respecting the American Edition? You tell me nothing of
yourself! It is all ME you help, me you do good to ... and I take it
all! Now see, if this goes on! I have not had _every_ love-luxury, I
now find out ... where is the proper, rationally
to-be-expected--'_lovers' quarrel_'? _Here_, as you will find! 'Irae;
amantium'.... I am no more 'at a loss with my Naso,' than Peter
Ronsard. Ah, but then they are to be _reintegratio amoris_--and to get
back into a thing, one must needs get for a moment first out of it ...
trust me, no! And now, the natural inference from all this? The
consistent inference ... the 'self-denying ordinance'? Why--do you
doubt? even this,--you must just put aside the Romance, and tell the
Americans to wait, and make my heart start up when the letter is laid
to it; the letter full of your news, telling me you are well and
walking, and working for my sake towards _the time_--informing me,
moreover, if Thursday or Friday is to be my day--.

May God bless you, my own love.

I will certainly bring you an Act of the Play ... for this serpent's
reason, in addition to the others ... that--No, I will _tell_ you
that--I can tell you now more than even lately!

Ever your own

R.B.

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF LETTER OF ROBERT BROWNING

(See Vol. I., p. 270)]

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Monday.
[Post-mark, November 11, 1845.]

If it were possible that you could do me harm in the way of work, (but
it isn't) it would be possible, not through writing letters and
reading manuscripts, but because of a reason to be drawn from your own
great line

What man is strong until he stands alone?

What man ... what woman? For have I not felt twenty times the desolate
advantage of being insulated here and of not minding anybody when I
made my poems?--of living a little like a disembodied spirit, and
caring less for suppositious criticism than for the black fly buzzing
in the pane?--_That_ made me what dear Mr. Kenyon calls