ks are
nearer: and also it always makes me a little savage when people talk
of Tennysonianisms! I have faults enough as the Muses know,--but let
them be _my_ faults! When I wrote the 'Romaunt of Margret,' I had not
read a line of Tennyson. I came from the country with my eyes only
half open, and he had not penetrated where I had been living and
sleeping: and in fact when I afterwards tried to reach him here in
London, nothing could be found except one slim volume, so that, till
the collected works appeared ... _favente_ Moxon, ... I was ignorant
of his best _early_ productions; and not even for the rhythmetical
form of my 'Vision of the Poets,' was I indebted to the 'Two
Voices,'--three pages of my 'Vision' having been written several years
ago--at the beginning of my illness--and thrown aside, and taken up
again in the spring of 1844. Ah, well! there's no use talking! In a
solitary review which noticed my 'Essay on Mind,' somebody wrote ...
'this young lady imitates Darwin'--and I never could _read_ Darwin,
... was stopped always on the second page of the 'Loves of the Plants'
when I tried to read him to 'justify myself in having an opinion'--the
repulsion was too strong. Yet the 'young lady imitated Darwin' of
course, as the infallible critic said so.

And who are Mr. Helps and Miss Emma Fisher and the 'many others,'
whose company brings one down to the right plebeianism? The 'three
poets in three distant ages born' may well stare amazed!

After all you shall not by any means say that I upset the inkstand on
your review in a passion--because pray mark that the ink has over-run
some of your praises, and that if I had been angry to the overthrow of
an inkstand, it would not have been precisely _there_. It is the
second book spoilt by me within these two days--and my fingers were so
dabbled in blackness yesterday that to wring my hands would only have
made matters worse. Holding them up to Mr. Kenyon they looked dirty
enough to befit a poetess--as black 'as bard beseemed'--and he took
the review away with him to read and save it from more harm.

How could it be that you did not get my letter which would have
reached you, I thought, on Monday evening, or on Tuesday at the very
very earliest?--and how is it that I did not hear from you last night
again when I was unreasonable enough to expect it? is it true that you
_hate_ writing to me?

At that word, comes the review back from dear Mr. Kenyon, and the
letter which I