art,' I am so silly.

Ah! you tempt me with a grand vision of Prometheus! _I_, who have just
escaped with my life, after treading Milton's ground, you would send
me to AEschylus's. No, _I do not dare_. And besides ... I am inclined
to think that we want new _forms_, as well as thoughts. The old gods
are dethroned. Why should we go back to the antique moulds, classical
moulds, as they are so improperly called? If it is a necessity of Art
to do so, why then those critics are right who hold that Art is
exhausted and the world too worn out for poetry. I do not, for my
part, believe this: and I believe the so-called necessity of Art to be
the mere feebleness of the artist. Let us all aspire rather to _Life_,
and let the dead bury their dead. If we have but courage to face these
conventions, to touch this low ground, we shall take strength from it
instead of losing it; and of that, I am intimately persuaded. For
there is poetry _everywhere_; the 'treasure' (see the old fable) lies
all over the field. And then Christianity is a worthy _myth_, and
poetically acceptable.

I had much to say to you, or at least something, of the 'blind hopes'
&c., but am ashamed to take a step into a new sheet. If you mean 'to
travel,' why, I shall have to miss you. Do you really mean it? How is
the play going on? and the poem?

May God bless you!

Ever and truly yours,

E.B.B.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Monday Morning.
[Post-mark, March 31, 1845.]

When you read Don Quixote, my dear romance-reader, do you ever notice
that flower of an incident of good fellowship where the friendly
Squire of Him of the Moon, or the Looking glasses, (I forget which)
passes to Sancho's dry lips, (all under a cork-tree one morning)--a
plump wine-skin,--and do you admire dear brave Miguel's knowledge of
thirsty nature when he tells you that the Drinker, having seriously
considered for a space the Pleiads, or place where they should be,
fell, as he slowly returned the shrivelled bottle to its donor, into a
deep musing of an hour's length, or thereabouts, and then ... mark ...
only _then_, fetching a profound sigh, broke silence with ... such a
piece of praise as turns pale the labours in that way of Rabelais and
the Teian (if he wasn't a Byzantine monk, alas!) and our Mr. Kenyon's
stately self--(since my own especial p