[Footnote 174:  This edition, published in 1849 in two volumes contained only Paracelsus and the plays and poems of the Bells and Pomegranates series.]

To John Kenyan [Florence:] May I, [1848].

My dearest Mr. Kenyon,—­Surely it is quite wrong that we three, Robert, you, and I, should be satisfied with writing little dry notes, as short as so many proclamations, and those of the order of your anti-Chartist magistracy, ’Whereas certain evil disposed persons &c. &c.,’ instead of our anti-Austrian Grand duchy’s ‘O figli amati’ (how characteristic of the north and the south, to be sure, is this contrast!  Yet, after all, they might have managed it rather better in England!)—­little dry notes brief and business-like as an anti-Chartist proclamation!  And, indeed, two of us are by no means satisfied, whatever the third may be.  The other day we were looking over some of the dear delightful letters you used to write to us.  Real letters those were, and not little dry notes at all.  Robert said, ’When I write to dear Mr. Kenyon I really do feel overcome by the sense of what I owe to him, and so, as it is beyond words to say, why generally I say as little as possible of anything, keeping myself to matters of business.’  An alternative very objectionable, I told him; for to have ‘a dumb devil’ from ever such grateful and sentimental reasons, when the Alps stand betwixt friend, is damnatory in the extreme.  Then, as you are not ‘too grateful’ to us, why don’t you write?  Pray do, my dear friend.  Let us all write as we used to do.  And to make sure of it, I begin.

Since I ended last the world has turned over on its other side, in order, one must hope, to some happy change in the dream.  Our friend, Miss Bayley, in that very kind letter which has just reached me and shall be answered directly (will you tell her with my thankful love?), asks if Robert and I are communists, and then half draws back her question into a discreet reflection that I, at least, was never much celebrated for acumen on political economy.  Most true indeed!  And therefore, and on that very ground, is it not the more creditable to me that I don’t set up for a communist immediately?  In proportion to the ignorance might be the stringency of the embrace of ’la verite sociale:’  so I claim a little credit that it isn’t.  For really we are not communists, farther than to admit the wisdom of voluntary association in matters of material life among the poorer classes.  And to legislate even on such points seems as objectionable as possible; all intermeddlings of government with domesticities, from Lacedaemon to Peru, were and must be objectionable; and of the growth of absolutism, let us, theorise as we choose.  I would have the government educate the people absolutely, and then give room for the individual to develop himself into life freely.  Nothing can be more hateful to me than this communist idea of quenching individualities