about
you--how you feel, dearest friend, and how you are. Do write and tell me
of yourself. May God bless you ever and ever!

Your affectionate and grateful
BA.

* * * * *

_To Madame Braun_

2 Rue do Perry, Le Havre, Maison Versigny:
August 10 [1858].

My dearest Madame Braun,--If you have not heard from me before, it has
not been that I have not thought of you anxiously and tenderly, but I
had the idea that so many must be thinking of you, and saying to you
with sad faces 'they were sorry,' that I kept away, not to be the one
too many. It seems so vain when we sympathise with a suffering friend.
And yet it is _something_--oh yes, I have felt that! But you _knew_ I
must feel for you, if I teased you with words or not; and I, for my
part, hearing of you from others, felt shy, as I say, till I heard you
were better, of writing to you myself. And you _are_ feeling better,
Mrs. Jameson tells me, and are somewhat more cheerful about your state.
I thank God for this good news....

One of the few reasons for which I regret our absence from England this
summer is that I miss seeing you with my own eyes, and I should like
much to see you and talk to you of things of interest to both of us. If
illness suppresses in us a few sources of pleasure, it leaves the real
_ich_ open to influences and keen-sighted to _facts_ which are as surely
_natural_ as the fly's wing, though we are apt to consider them vaguely
as 'supernatural.'

'More and more life is what we want' Tennyson wrote long ago, and that
is the right want. Indifference to life is disease, and therefore not
strength. But the life here is only half the apple--a cut out of the
apple, I should say, merely meant to suggest the perfect round of
fruit--and there is in the world now, I can testify to you, _scientific
proof_ that what we call death is a mere change of circumstances, a
change of dress, a mere breaking of the outside shell and husk. This
subject is so much the most interesting to me of all, that I can't help
writing of it to you. Among all the ways of progress along which the
minds of men are moving, this draws me most. There is much folly and
fanaticism, unfortunately, because foolish men and women do not cease to
be foolish when they hit upon a truth. There was a man who hung
bracelets upon plane trees. But it was a tree--it is a
truth--notwithstanding; yes, and so much a truth that in twenty years
the probability is you