0: 'Blind hopes.']

[Footnote 8: _Ib._ 251: 'A great benefit.']

[Footnote 9: _Ib._ 92: 'Behold what I suffer.']

[Footnote 10: _Ib._ 1093: 'Dost see how I suffer this wrong?']

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

50 Wimpole Street: March 20, 1845.

Whenever I delay to write to you, dear Mr. Browning, it is not, be
sure, that I take my 'own good time,' but submit to my own bad time.
It was kind of you to wish to know how I was, and not unkind of me to
suspend my answer to your question--for indeed I have not been very
well, nor have had much heart for saying so. This implacable weather!
this east wind that seems to blow through the sun and moon! who can be
well in such a wind? Yet for me, I should not grumble. There has been
nothing very bad the matter with me, as there used to be--I only grow
weaker than usual, and learn my lesson of being mortal, in a
corner--and then all this must end! April is coming. There will be
both a May and a June if we live to see such things, and perhaps,
after all, we may. And as to seeing _you_ besides, I observe that you
distrust me, and that perhaps you penetrate my morbidity and guess how
when the moment comes to see a living human face to which I am not
accustomed, I shrink and grow pale in the spirit. Do you? You are
learned in human nature, and you know the consequences of leading such
a secluded life as mine--notwithstanding all my fine philosophy about
social duties and the like--well--if you have such knowledge or if you
have it not, I cannot say, but I do say that I will indeed see you
when the warm weather has revived me a little, and put the earth 'to
rights' again so as to make pleasures of the sort possible. For if you
think that I shall not _like_ to see you, you are wrong, for all your
learning. But I shall be afraid of you at first--though I am not, in
writing thus. You are Paracelsus, and I am a recluse, with nerves that
have been all broken on the rack, and now hang loosely--quivering at a
step and breath.

And what you say of society draws me on to many comparative thoughts
of your life and mine. You seem to have drunken of the cup of life
full, with the sun shining on it. I have lived only inwardly; or with
_sorrow_, for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my illness, I
was secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the
world who have not seen more, heard more, known more, of society, than
I, who am scarcely to be called young