Tell me if you make acquaintance with Mrs. Hewitt’s new ballads.

Mrs. Jameson is engaged in a work on art which will be very interesting....

Flush’s love to your Flopsy.  Flush has grown very overbearing in this Italy, I think because my husband spoils him (if not for the glory at Vaucluse); Robert declares that the said Flush considers him, my husband, to be created for the especial purpose of doing him service, and really it looks rather like it.

Never do I see the ‘Athenaeum’ now, but before I left England some pure gushes between the rocks reminded me of you.  Tell me all you can; it will all be like rain upon dry ground.  My husband bids me offer his regards to you—­if you will accept them; and that you may do it ask your heart.  I will assure you (aside) that his poetry is as the prose of his nature:  he himself is so much better and higher than his own works.

In the middle of April the Brownings left Pisa and journeyed to Florence, arriving there on April 20.  There, however, the programme was arrested, and, save for an abortive excursion to Vallombrosa, whence they were repulsed by the misogynist principles of the monks, they continued to reside in Florence for the remainder of the year.  Their first abode was in the Via delle Belle Donne; but after the return from Vallombrosa, in August, they moved across the river, and took furnished rooms in the Palazzo Guidi, the building which, under the name of ‘Casa Guidi,’ is for ever associated with their memory.

To Mrs. Martin Florence:  April 24, 1847.

I received your letter, my dearest friend, by this day’s post, and wrote a little note directly to the office as a trap for the feet of your travellers.  If they escape us after all, therefore, they may praise their stars for it rather than my intentions—­our intentions, I should say, for Robert will gladly do everything he can in the way of expounding a text or two of the glories of Florence, and we both shall be much pleased and cordially pleased to learn more of Fanny and her brother than the glance at Pisa could teach us.  As for me, she will let me have a little talking for my share:  I can’t walk about or see anything.  I lie here flat on the sofa in order to be wise; I rest and take port wine by wineglasses; and a few more days of it will prepare me, I hope and trust, for an interview with the Venus de’ Medici.  Think of my having been in Florence since Tuesday, this being Saturday, and not a step taken into the galleries.  It seems a disgrace, a sort of involuntary disgraceful act, or rather no-act, which to complain of relieves one to some degree.  And how kind of you to wish to hear from me of myself!  There is nothing really much the matter with me; I am just weak, sleeping and eating dreadfully well considering that Florence isn’t seen yet, and ‘looking well,’ too, says Mrs. Jameson, who, with her niece, is our guest just now.  It would have been wise if I had rested longer at Pisa,