two months ago and more, then we brought it to ‘answer’ among the chestnut trees; but immediately on our arrival a friend was attacked by fever, and we were kept in anxiety about him for six weeks.  At last he recovered sufficiently to leave for Florence, and (just think) our little boy became ill, for the first time in his life, and gave us solicitude enough for a fortnight:  it is nothing now that it is over; he is going about now almost as well as before, and we go away to-morrow, as I said.  But I will try and get one, at least, of the joys I came to find here, and really write to you from this place, as I meant to do. ’I’—­you know it is my wife that I write for, though you entangle and distract either of us by the reverberations (so to speak) of pleasures over and above the pleasure you give us.  I intend to say, that you praise that poem, and mix it up with praise of her very self, and then give it to me directly, and then give it to her with the pride you have just given me, and then it somehow comes back to me increased so far, till the effect is just as you probably intended.  I wish my wife may know you more:  I wish you may see and know her more, but you cannot live by her eleven years, as I have done—­or yes, what cannot you do, being the man, the poet you are?  This last word, I dare think, I have a right to say; I have always venerated you as a poet; I believe your poetry to be sure of its eventual reward; other people, not unlikely, may feel like me, that there has been no need of getting into feverish haste to cry out on what is; yet you, who wrote it, can leave it and look at other poetry, and speak so of it:  how well of you!

I am still too near the production of Aurora Leigh to be quite able to see it all; my wife used to write it, and lay it down to hear our child spell, or when a visitor came,—­it was thrust under the cushion then.  At Paris, a year ago last March, she gave me the first six books to read, I having never seen a line before.  She then wrote the rest, and transcribed them in London, where I read them also.  I wish, in one sense, that I had written and she had read it....  I shall commend myself to you by telling you this.  Indeed, the proper acknowledgement of your letter seems to be that one should do something, not say something.  If you were here, I might quite naturally begin repeating Giaffar or Solomon, and the rest.  You would see whether I was not capable of getting all the good out of your praise.

While I write, there is a strange thing that happened last night impossible to get out of my thoughts.  It may give you pain to tell you of it, yet if with the pain come triumphant memories and hopes, as I expect there will, you may choose the pain with them.  What decides me to tell it is that I heard you years ago allude to the destruction of a volume of Lamia, Isabella, &c., to be restored to you yet—­now you remember; also, I think, of your putting my name