[11 February 1845]. Browning, Robert to Browning, Elizabeth Barrett.

              Hatcham,

Tuesday. 

Dear Miss Barrett,

People would hardly ever tell falsehoods about a matter, if they had been let tell truth in the beginning-for it is hard to prophane one’s very self, and nobody who has-for instance-used certain words and ways to a mother or a father could .. even if by the devil’s help he would .. reproduce or mimic them with any effect to anybody else that was to be won over; and so, if “I love you” were always outspoken when it might be, there would, I suppose, be no fear of its desecration at any after time: but lo! only last night, I had to write, on the part of Mr Carlyle, to a certain ungainly foolish gentleman who keeps back from him, with all the fussy impotence of stupidity (not bad feeling, alas; for that we could deal with) a certain m∙s letter of Cromwell’s which completes the Collection now going to press-and this long-ears had to be “dear Sir’d” and “obedient servanted” till I said (to use a mild word) “Commend me to the sincerities of this kind of thing”!- When I spoke of you knowing little of me, one of the senses in which I meant so was this .. that I would not well vowel-point my common-place letters and syllables with a masoretic other sound and sense, make my “dear” something intenser than “dears” in ordinary, and “yours ever” a thought more significant than the run of its like; and all this came of your talking of “tiring me,” “being too curious,” &c. &c which I should never have heard of had the plain truth looked out of my letter with its unmistakeable eyes: now, what you say of the “bowing,” and convention that is to be, and tant de façons that are not to be, helps me once and for ever-for have I not a right to say simply that, for reasons I know,-