carrying back our treasure with us to Florence to-morrow, quite recovered, if a little thinner and weaker, and the young voice as merry as ever.  You are aware that that child I am more proud of than twenty Auroras, even after Leigh Hunt has praised them.  He is eight years old, has never been ‘crammed’, but reads English, Italian, French, German, and plays the piano—­then, is the sweetest child! sweeter than he looks.  When he was ill, he said to me, ’You pet! don’t be unhappy about me.  Think it’s a boy in the street, and be a little sorry, but not unhappy.’  Who could not be unhappy, I wonder?

I never saw your book called the Religion of the Heart. It’s the only book of yours I never saw, and I mean to wipe out that reproach on the soonest day possible.  I receive more dogmas, perhaps (my ‘perhaps’ being in the dark rather), than you do.  I believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ in the intensest sense—­that he was God absolutely.  But for the rest, I am very unorthodox—­about the spirit, the flesh, and the devil, and if you would not let me sit by you, a great many churchmen wouldn’t; in fact, churches do all of them, as at present constituted, seem too narrow and low to hold true Christianity in its proximate developments.  I, at least, cannot help believing them so.

My dear friend, can we dare, after our sins against you—­can we dare wish for a letter from you sometimes?  Ask, we dare not.  May God bless you.  Even if you had not praised me and made me so grateful, I should be grateful to you for three things—­for your poetry (that first), then for Milton’s hair, and then for the memory I have of our visit to you, when you sat in that chair and spoke so mildly and deeply at once.

Let me be ever affectionately yours,

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

1816-1855

TO A FRIEND

Trials of a governess

July 1839.

I cannot procure ink, without going into the drawing-room, where I do not wish to go....  I should have written to you long since, and told you every detail of the utterly new scene into which I have lately been cast, had I not been daily expecting a letter from yourself, and wondering and lamenting that you did not write; for you will remember it was your turn.  I must not bother you too much with my sorrows, of which, I fear, you have heard an exaggerated account.  If you were near me, perhaps I might be tempted to tell you all, to grow egotistical, and pour out the long history of a private governess’s trials and crosses in her first situation.  As it is, I will only ask you to imagine the miseries of a reserved wretch like me, thrown at once into the midst of a large family—­proud as peacocks and wealthy as Jews—­at a time when they were particularly gay—­when the house was filled with company—­all