If really, my dear Mr. Westwood, it was an ‘ill temper’ in you, causing the brief note, it was a most flattering ill temper, and I thank you just as I have had reason to do for the good nature which has caused you to bear with me so often and so long.  You have been misled on some points.  I did not go to Italy last year, or rather the year before last!  I was disappointed and forced to stay in Wimpole Street after all; but the winter being so mild, so miraculously mild for England you may remember, I was spared my winter relapse and left liberty for new plans such as I never used to think were in my destiny!  Such a change it is to me, such a strange happiness and freedom, and you must not in your kindness wish me back again, but rather be contented, like a friend as you are, to hear that I am very happy and very well, and still doubtful whether all the brightness can be meant for me!  It is just as if the sun rose again at 7 o’clock P.M.  The strangeness seems so great....

I am now very well, and so happy as not to think much of it, except for the sake of another.  And do you fancy how I feel, carried; into the visions of nature from my gloomy room.  Even now I walk as in a dream.  We made a pilgrimage from Avignon to Vaucluse in right poetical duty, and I and my husband sate upon two stones in the midst of the fountain which in its dark prison of rocks flashes and roars and testifies to the memory of Petrarch.  It was louder and fuller than usual when we were there, on account of the rains; and Flush, though by no means born to be a hero, considered my position so outrageous that he dashed through the water to me, splashing me all over, so he is baptised in Petrarch’s name.  The scenery is full of grandeur, the rocks sheathe themselves into the sky, and nothing grows there except a little cypress here and there, and a straggling olive tree; and the fountain works out its soul in its stony prison, and runs away in a green rapid stream.  Such a striking sight it is.  I sate upon deck, too, in our passage from Marseilles to Genoa, and had a vision of mountains, six or seven deep, one behind another.  As to Pisa, call it a beautiful town, you cannot do less with Arno and its palaces, and above all the wonderful Duomo and Campo Santo, and Leaning Tower and Baptistery, all of which are a stone’s throw from our windows.  We have rooms in a great college-house built by Vasari, and fallen into desuetude from collegiate purposes; and here we live the quietest and most tete-a-tete of lives, knowing nobody, hearing nothing, and for nearly three months together never catching a glimpse of a paper.  Oh, how wrong you were about the ‘Times’!  Now, however, we subscribe to a French and Italian library, and have a French newspaper every evening, the ‘Siecle,’ and so look through a loophole at the world.  Yet, not too proud are we, even now, for all the news you will please to send us in charity:  ‘da obolum Belisario!’

What do you mean about poor Tennyson?  I heard of him last on his return from a visit to the Swiss mountains, which ‘disappointed him,’ he was said to say.  Very wrong, either of mountains or poet!