d friends--I feel as if it were the
merest swindling to attempt to give the least account of myself to
anybody, and when their letters come and I know that nothing very
fatal has happened to them, scarcely I can read to an end afterwards
through the besetting care of having to answer it all. Then I am
ignoble enough to revenge myself on people for their stupidities ...
which never in my life I did before nor felt the temptation to do ...
and when they have a distaste for your poetry through want of
understanding, I have a distaste for _them_ ... cannot help it--and
you need not say it is wrong, because I know the whole iniquity of it,
persisting nevertheless. As for dear Mr. Kenyon--with whom we began,
and who thinks of you as appreciatingly and admiringly as one man can
think of another,--do not imagine that, if he _should_ see anything,
he can 'approve' of either your wisdom or my generosity, ... _he_,
with his large organs of caution, and his habit of looking right and
left, and round the corner a little way. Because, you know, ... if I
should be ill _before_ ... why there, is a conclusion!--but if
_afterward_ ... what? You who talk wildly of my generosity, whereas I
only and most impotently tried to be generous, must see how both
suppositions have their possibility. Nevertheless you are the master
to run the latter risk. You have overcome ... to your loss
perhaps--unless the judgment is revised. As to taking the half of my
prison ... I could not even smile at _that_ if it seemed probable ...
I should recoil from your affection even under a shape so fatal to you
... dearest! No! There is a better probability before us I hope and
believe--in spite of the _possibility_ which it is impossible to deny.
And now we leave this subject for the present.

_Sunday._--You are 'singularly well.' You are very seldom quite well,
I am afraid--yet 'Luria' seems to have done no harm this time, as you
are singularly well the day _after_ so much writing. Yet do not hurry
that last act.... I won't have it for a long while yet.

Here I have been reading Carlyle upon Cromwell and he is very fine,
very much himself, it seems to me, everywhere. Did Mr. Kenyon make you
understand that I had said there was nothing in him but _manner_ ... I
thought he said so--and I am confident that he never heard such an
opinion from me, for good or for evil, ever at all. I may have
observed upon those vulgar attacks on account of the so-called
_mannerism_,