notes are waiting all this time to be answered. Do believe that they
were not, either of them, addressed to an ungrateful person, and that
the only reason of their being received _silently_ was my hope of
answering them more agreeably to both of us--by talking instead of
writing.

Yes; you have read my mystery.[24]

You paid a tithe to your human nature in reading only _nine-tenths_
of it, and the rest was a pure gift to your friendship for me, and is
taken and will be remembered as such. But you have a cruel heart for
a parody, and this one tried my sensibility so much that I cried--with
laughing. I confess to you notwithstanding, it was _very fair_, and
dealt its blow with a shining pointed weapon.

But what will you say to me when I confess besides that, in the face
of all your kind encouragement, my Drama of the Angels[25] has never
been touched until the last three days? It was _not_ out of pure
idleness on my part, nor of disregard to your admonition; but when my
thoughts were distracted with other things, books just begun inclosing
me all around, a whole load of books upon my conscience, I could not
possibly rise up to the gate of heaven and write about my angels.
You know one can't sometimes sit down to the sublunary, occupation
of reading Greek, unless one feels _free_ to it. And writing poetry
requires a double liberty, and an inclination which comes only of
itself.

But I have begun. I tried the blank metre once, and it _would not
do_, and so I had to begin again in lyrics. Something above an hundred
lines is written, and now I am in two panics, just as if one were not