e the most insusceptible and
least grateful of human beings--no small distinction in our bad obtuse
world. Yet the truth is--oh, the truth is, that I am deeply grateful to
you and have felt to the quick of my heart the meaning and kindness of
your words, the worth of your sympathy and praise. One thing especially
which you said, made me thankful that I had been allowed to live to hear
it--since even to fancy that anything I had written could be the means
of the least good to _you_, is worth all the trumpet blowing of a vulgar
fame. Oh, of course, I do not exaggerate, though your generosity does. I
understand the case as it is. We burn straw and it warms us. My verses
catch fire from you as you read them, and so you see them in that light
of your own. But it is something to be used to such an end by such a
man, and I thank you, thank you, and so does my husband, for the deep
pleasure you have given us in the words you have written.

And why not say so sooner? Just because I wanted to say so fully, and
because I have been crushed into a corner past all elbow-room for doing
anything largely and comfortably, by work and fuss and uncertainty of
various kinds. Now it isn't any better scarcely, though it is quite
fixed now that we are going from Florence to England--no more of the
shadow dancing which is so pretty at the opera and so fatiguing in real
life. We are coming, and have finished most of our preparations;
conducted on a balance of--must we go? _may_ we stay? which is so very
inconvenient. If you knew what it is to give up this still dream-life of
our Florence, where if one is over-busy ever, the old tapestries on the
walls and the pre-Giotto pictures (picked up by my husband for so many
pauls) surround us ready to quiet us again--if you knew what it is to
give it all up and be put into the mill of a dingy London lodging and
ground very small indeed, you wouldn't be angry with us for being sorry
to go north--you wouldn't think it unnatural. As for me, I have all
sorts of pain in England--everything is against me, except a few things;
and yet, while my husband and I groan at one another, strophe and
antistrophe (pardon that rag of Greek!) we admit our compensations--that
it will be an excellent thing, for instance, to see Mr. Ruskin! Are we
likely to undervalue that?

Let me consider how to answer your questions. My poetry--which you are
so good to, and which you once thought 'sickly,' you say, and why not?
(I have of