walking tour into
Cornwall with Alfred Tennyson, to tread in the steps of King Arthur.
Tennyson was dreadfully afraid of being recognised and mobbed, and
desired to be called 'the other gentleman,' which straightway became
convertible now and then into 'the old gentleman,' much to his
vexation. But Mr. Prinsep is in the roses and lilies of youth, and
comparatively speaking, of course, the great Laureate was an ancient. He
is in considerable trouble, too by their building a fort in front of his
house on the southern coast of the Isle of Wight. I couldn't help saying
that he deserved it for having written 'Riflemen, arm!' It's a piece of
pure poetical justice, really.

Here I end.

Write to me, my Isa, and do me good with your tender, warm thoughts. Do
you think I have no comfort in feeling them stroke me softly through the
dark and distance?

May God love you, dearest Isa!

Always your loving
BA.

Robert's true love, and Pen's.

The weather is wonderfully warm. In fact, the winter has been very
mild--milder than usual for even Rome.

* * * * *

_To Miss E.F. Haworth_

126 Via Felice, Rome:
Tuesday, [about January 1861].

You really astonish me, dearest Fanny, so much by your letter, that I
must reply to it at once. I ask myself under what new influence
(strictly clerical) is she now, that she should write so? And has she
forgotten me, never read 'Aurora Leigh,' never heard of me or from me
that, before 'Spiritualism' came up in America, I have been called
orthodox by infidels, and heterodox by church-people; and gone on
predicting to such persons as came near enough to me in speculative
liberty of opinion to justify my speaking, that the present churches
were in course of dissolution, and would have to be followed by a
reconstruction of Christian essential verity into other than these
middle-age scholastic forms. Believing in Christ's divinity, which is
the life of Christianity, I believed this. Otherwise, if the end were
here--if we were to be covered over and tucked in with the Thirty-nine
Articles or the like, and good-night to us for a sound sleep in 'sound
doctrine'--I should fear for a revealed religion incapable of expansion
according to the needs of man. What comes from God has life in it, and
certainly from all the growth of living things, spiritual growth cannot
be excepted. But I shun religious controversy--it is useless. I never
'disturb anybody's mind,' as it