y your leave. Ask the Commissioners of Lunacy; knock at the
door of mad-houses in general, and inquire what two causes act almost
universally in filling them. Answer--love and religion. The common
objection of the degradation of knocking with the leg of the table, and
the ridicule of the position for a spirit, &c., &c., I don't enter into
at all. Twice I have been present at table-experiments, and each time I
was deeply impressed--impressed, there's the word for it! The panting
and shivering of that dead dumb wood, the human emotion conveyed through
it--by what? had to me a greater significance than the St. Peter's of
this Rome. O poet! do you not know that poetry is not confined to the
clipped alleys, no, nor to the blue tops of 'Parnassus hill'? Poetry is
where we live and have our being--wherever God works and man
understands. Hein! ... if you are in a dungeon and a friend knocks
through the outer wall, spelling out by knocks the words you comprehend;
you don't think the worse of the friend standing in the sun who
remembers you. He is not degraded by it, you rather think. Now apply
this. Certainly, there is a reaction from the materialism of the age,
and this is certainly well, in my mind, but then there is something more
than this, more than a mere human reaction, I believe. I have not the
power of writing myself at all, though I have felt the pencil turn in my
hand--a peculiar spiral motion like the turning of the tables, and
independent of volition, but the power is not with me strong enough to
make words or letters even.

We see a good deal of Fanny Kemble, a noble creature, and hear her
sister sing--Mrs. Sartoris. Do admit a little society. It is good for
soul and body, and on the Continent it is easy to get a handful of
society without paying too dear for it. That, I think, is an advantage
of Continental life.

* * * * *

_To Miss Mitford_

43 Via Bocca di Leone, Rome: March 19, 1854.

My dearest Miss Mitford,--Your letter made my heart ache. It is sad, sad
indeed, that you should have had this renewed cold just as you appeared
to be rallying a little from previous shocks, and I know how depressing
and enfeebling a malady the influenza is. It's the vulture finishing the
work of the wolf. I pray God that, having battled through this last
attack, you may be gradually strengthened and relieved by the incoming
of the spring (though an English spring makes one shiver to think of