en the wheel goes round and the procession
is uninterrupted. Is it not so with you? oh--it must be so. For the
rest, there will be necessarily a reaction; and, in my own particular
case, whenever I see a poem of mine in print, or even smoothly
transcribed, the reaction is most painful. The pleasure, the sense of
power, without which I could not write a line, is gone in a moment;
and nothing remains but disappointment and humiliation. I never wrote
a poem which you could not persuade me to tear to pieces if you took
me at the right moment! I have a _seasonable_ humility, I do assure
you.

How delightful to talk about oneself; but as you 'tempted me and I did
eat,' I entreat your longsuffering of my sin, and ah! if you would
but sin back so in turn! You and I seem to meet in a mild contrarious
harmony ... as in the 'si no, si no' of an Italian duet. I want to see
more of men, and you have seen too much, you say. I am in ignorance,
and you, in satiety. 'You don't even care about reading now.' Is it
possible? And I am as 'fresh' about reading, as ever I was--as long as
I keep out of the shadow of the dictionaries and of theological
controversies, and the like. Shall I whisper it to you under the
memory of the last rose of last summer? _I am very fond of romances_;
yes! and I read them not only as some wise people are known to do, for
the sake of the eloquence here and the sentiment there, and the
graphic intermixtures here and there, but for the story! just as
little children would, sitting on their papa's knee. My childish love
of a story never wore out with my love of plum cake, and now there is
not a hole in it. I make it a rule, for the most part, to read all the
romances that other people are kind enough to write--and woe to the
miserable wight who tells me how the third volume endeth. Have you in
you any surviving innocence of this sort? or do you call it idiocy? If
you do, I will forgive you, only smiling to myself--I give you
notice,--with a smile of superior pleasure! Mr. Chorley made me quite
laugh the other day by recommending Mary Hewitt's 'Improvisatore,'
with a sort of deprecating reference to the _descriptions_ in the
book, just as if I never read a novel--_I!_ I wrote a confession back
to him which made him shake his head perhaps, and now I confess to
_you_, unprovoked. I am one who could have forgotten the plague,
listening to Boccaccio's stories; and I am not ashamed of it. I do not
even 'see the better p