I'm copying out Virginia Woolf's essay about Elizabeth Barrett Browning, watching clumps of new snow fall off the trees, listening to the clock tick.

VW writes: "How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers."

EBB writes: "But how willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering, ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some experience of life, and man, for some . . . "

Those are her ellipses, and they make me sad.