an't get resigned to the association of any sort
of suffering with his laughing dimpled little body--it is the blowing
about in the wind of such a heap of roses. So you prefer 'Shirley' to
'Jane Eyre'! Yet I hear from nobody such an opinion; yet you are very
probably right, for 'Shirley' may suffer from the natural reaction
of the public mind. What you tell me of Tennyson interests me
as everything about him must. I like to think of him digging
gardens--room for cabbage and all. At the same time, what he says
about the public '_hating_ poetry' is certainly not a word for
Tennyson. Perhaps no true poet, having claims upon attention _solely_
through his poetry, has attained so certain a success with such short
delay. Instead of being pelted (as nearly every true poet has been),
he stands already on a pedestal, and is recognised as a master spirit
not by a coterie but by the great public. Three large editions of the
'Princess' have already been sold. If he isn't satisfied after all, I
think he is wrong. Divine poet as he is, and no laurel being too leafy
for him, yet he must be an unreasonable man, and not understanding
of the growth of the laurel trees and the nature of a reading public.
With regard to the other garden-digger, dear Mr. Home, I wish as you
do that I could hear something satisfactory of him. I wrote from Lucca
in the summer, and have no answer. The latest word concerning him is
the announcement in the 'Athenaeum' of a third edition of his 'Gregory
the Seventh,' which we were glad to see, but very, very glad we should
be to have news of his prosperity in the flesh as well as in the
_litterae scriptae_....

I have not been out of doors these two months, but people call me
'looking well,' and a newly married niece of Miss Bayley's, the
accomplished Miss Thomson, who has become the wife of Dr. Emil Braun
(the learned German secretary of the Archaeological Society), and just
passed through Florence on her way to Rome, where they are to reside,
declared that the change she saw in me was miraculous--'wonderful
indeed.' I took her to look at Wiedeman in his cradle, fast asleep,
and she won my heart (over again, for always she was a favorite of
mine) by exclaiming at his prettiness. Charmed, too, we both were
with Dr. Braun--I mean Robert and I were charmed. He has a mixture of
fervour and simplicity which is still more delightfully picturesque
in his foreign English. Oh, he speaks English perfectly, only with an
o