f you. If I could fancy some method of what I shall say
happening without all the obvious stumbling-blocks of falseness, &c.
which no foolish fancy dares associate with you ... if you COULD tell
me when I next sit by you--'I will undeceive you,--I am not _the_ Miss
B.--she is up-stairs and you shall see her--I only wrote those
letters, and am what you see, that is all now left you' (all the
misapprehension having arisen from _me_, in some inexplicable way) ...
I should not begin by _saying_ anything, dear, dearest--but _after
that_, I should assure you--soon make you believe that I did not much
wonder at the event, for I have been all my life asking what
connection there is between the satisfaction at the display of power,
and the sympathy with--ever-increasing sympathy with--all imaginable
weakness? Look now: Coleridge writes on and on,--at last he writes a
note to his 'War-Eclogue,' in which he avers himself to have been
actuated by a really--on the whole--_benevolent_ feeling to Mr. Pitt
when he wrote that stanza in which 'Fire' means to 'cling to him
everlastingly'--where is the long line of admiration now that the end
snaps? And now--here I refuse to fancy--you KNOW whether, if you never
write another line, speak another intelligible word, recognize me by a
look again--whether I shall love you less or _more_ ... MORE; having a
right to expect more strength with the strange emergency. And it is
because I know this, build upon this entirely, that as a reasonable
creature, I am bound to look first to what hangs farthest and most
loosely from me ... what _might_ go from you to your loss, and so to
mine, to say the least ... because I want ALL of you, not just so much
as I could not live without--and because I see the danger of your
entirely generous disposition and cannot quite, yet, bring myself to
profit by it in the quiet way you recommend. Always remember, I never
wrote to you, all the years, on the strength of your poetry, though I
constantly heard of you through Mr. K. and was near seeing you once,
and might have easily availed myself of his intervention to commend
any letter to your notice, so as to reach you out of the foolish crowd
of rushers-in upon genius ... who come and eat their bread and cheese
on the high-altar, and talk of reverence without one of its surest
instincts--never quiet till they cut their initials on the cheek of
the Medicean Venus to prove they worship her. My admiration, as I
said, went it