My dearest papa is with me now, making me very happy of course. I have much reason to be happy--more to be grateful--yet am more obedient to the former than to the latter impulse. May the Giver of good give gratitude with as full a hand! May He bless _you_--and bring us together again, if no more in the flesh, yet in the spirit! Your ever affectionate friend, E.B. BARRETT. Do write--when you are able and _least_ disinclined. Do you approve of Prince Albert or not?[53] [Footnote 53: The engagement of Prince Albert to Queen Victoria took place in October 1839.] _To H.S. Boyd_ Torquay: May 29, 1840. My ever dear Friend,--It was very pleasant to me to see your seal upon a letter once more; and although the letter itself left me with a mournful impression of your having passed some time so much less happily than I would wish and pray for you, yet there remains the pleasant thought to me still that you have not altogether forgotten me. Do receive the expression of my most affectionate sympathy under this and every circumstance--and I fear that the shock to your nerves and spirits could not be a light one, however impressed you might be and must be with the surety and verity of God's love working in all His will. Poor poor Patience! Coming to be so happy with you, with that joyous smile I thought so pretty! Do you not remember my telling you so? Well--it is well and better for her; happier for her, if God in Christ Jesus have received her, than her hopes were of the holiday time with you. The holiday is _for ever_ now.... I heard from Nelly Bordman only a few days before receiving your letter, and so far from preparing me for all this sadness and gloom, she pleased me with her account of you whom she had lately seen--dwelling upon your retrograde passage into youth, and the delight you were taking in the presence and society of some still more youthful, fair, and gay _monstrum amandum_, some prodigy of intellectual accomplishment, some little Circe who never turned anybodies into pigs. I learnt too from her for the first time that you were settled at Hampstead! Whereabout at Hampstead, and for how long? She didn't tell me _that_, thinking of course that I knew something more about you than I do. Yes indeed; you _do_ treat me very shabbily. I agree with you in thinking so. To think that so many hills and woods should interpose between us--that I should be lying here, fast bound by a spell, a sleeping beauty in a forest, and that _you_, who used to be such a doughty knight, should not take the trouble of cutting through even a hazel tree with your good sword, to find out what had become of me. Now do tell me, the hazel tree being down at last, whether you mean to live at Hampstead, whether you have taken a house there and have carried your books there, and wear Hampstead grasshoppers in your bonnet (as they did at Athens) to prove yourself of the soil.