than in that same number! Also you have extended
your sweep of power--the sea-weed is thrown farther (if not higher)
than it was found before; and one may calculate surely now how a few
more waves will cover the brown stones and float the sight up away
through the fissure of the rocks. The rhythm (to touch one of the
various things) the rhythm of that 'Duchess' does more and more strike
me as a new thing; something like (if like anything) what the Greeks
called pedestrian-metre, ... between metre and prose ... the difficult
rhymes combining too quite curiously with the easy looseness of the
general measure. Then 'The Ride'--with that touch of natural feeling
at the end, to prove that it was not in brutal carelessness that the
poor horse was driven through all that suffering ... yes, and how that
one touch of softness acts back upon the energy and resolution and
exalts both, instead of weakening anything, as might have been
expected by the vulgar of writers or critics. And then 'Saul'--and in
a first place 'St. Praxed'--and for pure description, 'Fortu' and the
deep 'Pictor Ignotus'--and the noble, serene 'Italy in England,' which
grows on you the more you know of it--and that delightful 'Glove'--and
the short lyrics ... for one comes to _'select' everything_ at last,
and certainly I do like these poems better and better, as your poems
are made to be liked. But you will be tired to hear it said over and
over so, ... and I am going to 'Luria,' besides.

When you write will you say exactly how you are? and will you write?
And I want to explain to you that although I don't make a profession
of equable spirits, (as a matter of temperament, my spirits were
always given to rock a little, up and down) yet that I did not mean to
be so ungrateful and wicked as to complain of low spirits now and to
you. It would not be true either: and I said 'low' to express a merely
bodily state. My opium comes in to keep the pulse from fluttering and
fainting ... to give the right composure and point of balance to the
nervous system. I don't take it for 'my spirits' in the usual sense;
you must not think such a thing. The medical man who came to see me
made me take it the other day when he was in the room, before the
right hour and when I was talking quite cheerfully, just for the need
he observed in the pulse. 'It was a necessity of my position,' he
said. Also I do not suffer from it in any way, as people usually do
who take opium. I am not e