Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/90

74 tenderness misunderstood and crushed, ignorantly, profanely, and vilely, by false friends and a pattern wife. His blood is on our heads—on us in England."

Many contemporaries included in or suggested for A New Spirit of the Age are criticised by Miss Barrett with that independence of expression, that vigour—absurdly styled "masculine vigour"—of thought; but enough has been said to prove that her mastery of language was not confined to poesy only, and that her thoughts could be told as fluently, yet as condensedly, in prose. With some few words from her letters on Horne's paper about herself, a paper of which she saw nothing until it appeared in print, we can take leave of A New Spirit of the Age. To write about herself was, as Horne points out, a nice and delicate thing, but, as he adds, "she gets through it with the ease of any truthful person who believes in the truthfulness of another."

It has been haunting me all this morning that you may be drawing the very last inference I should wish you to draw from my silence. But I have been so unwell that I could not even read, and the writing has been impossible, and people cry out even now, "Why, surely you are not going to write!" I must write. It is on my mind and must be off it.

First to thank you for the books, which it was such unnecessary kindness for you to send—and then for the abundant kindness in another way which will, at the earliest thought, occur to you. My only objection to the paper is, that the personal kindness is too evident. My objection, you will see, leaves me full of gratitude to you, and fills to the brim that Venetian goblet of former obligations, which never held any poison.

You are guilty of certain exaggerations, however, in speaking of me, against which I shall oppose my dele as you allow me. For instance, I have not been shut up in one room for six or seven years—four or five would be nearer; and then, except on one occasion, I have not been for "several weeks together in the dark" during the course of them. And then there is not a single "elegant Latin verse" extant from my hand. I never cultivated Latin verses. . ..