l _that_ do? ... how
good you are to me--how dear you must be! Dear--dearest--if I feel
that you love me, can I help it if, without any other sort of certain
knowledge, the world grows lighter round me? being but a mortal woman,
can I help it? no--certainly.

I comfort myself by thinking sometimes that I can at least understand
you, ... comprehend you in what you are and in what you possess and
combine; and that, if doing this better than others who are better
otherwise than I, I am, so far, worthier of the ... I mean that to
understand you is something, and that I account it something in my own
favour ... mine.

Yet when you tell me that I ought to know some things, though untold,
you are wrong, and speak what is impossible. My imagination sits by
the roadside [Greek: apedilos] like the startled sea nymph in
AEschylus, but never dares to put one unsandalled foot, unbidden, on a
certain tract of ground--never takes a step there unled! and never (I
write the simple truth) even as the alternative of the probability of
your ceasing to care for me, have I touched (untold) on the
possibility of your caring _more_ for me ... never! That you should
_continue_ to care, was the utmost of what I saw in that direction.
So, when you spoke of a 'strengthened feeling,' judge how I listened
with my heart--judge!

'Luria' is very great. You will avenge him with the sympathies of the
world; that, I foresee.... And for the rest, it is a magnanimity which
grows and grows, and which will, of a worldly necessity, fall by its
own weight at last; nothing less being possible. The scene with
Tiburzio and the end of the act with its great effects, are more
pathetic than professed pathos. When I come to criticise, it will be
chiefly on what I take to be a little occasional flatness in the
versification, which you may remove if you please, by knotting up a
few lines here and there. But I shall write more of 'Luria,'--and
well remember in the meanwhile, that you wanted smoothness, you said.

May God bless you. I shall have the letter to-night, I think gladly.
Yes,--I thought of the greater safety from 'comment'--it is best in
every way.

I lean on you and trust to you, and am always, as to one who is all to
me,

Your own--

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

[Post-mark, December 4, 1845.]

Why of course I am pleased--I should have been pleased last year, for
the vanity'