when we wish to use it; and when we care to let it, producing eight or ten pounds a month in help of travelling expenses.  It’s the best investment for Mr. Moxon’s money we could have looked the world over for.  So the learned tell us; and after all, you know, we only pay in the proportion of your working classes in the Pancras building contrived for them by the philanthropy of your Southwood Smiths.  I do wish you could see what rooms we have, what ceilings, what height and breadth, what a double terrace for orange trees; how cool, how likely to be warm, how perfect every way!  Robert leaned once to a ground floor in the Frescobaldi Palace, being bewitched by a garden full of camellias, and a little pond of gold and silver fish; but while he saw the fish I saw the mosquitos in clouds, such an apocalypse of them as has not yet been visible to me in all Florence, and I dread mosquitos more than Austrians; and he, in his unspeakable goodness, deferred to my fear in a moment and gave up the camellias without one look behind.  A heavy conscience I should have if it were not that the camellia garden was certainly less private than our terrace here, where we can have camellias also if we please.  How pretty and pleasant your cottage at Windsor must be!  We had a long muse over your father’s sketch of it, and set faces at the windows.  That the dear invalid is better for the change must have brightened it, too, to her companions, and the very sound of a ‘forest’ is something peculiarly delightful and untried to me.  I know hills well, and of the sea too much; but now I want forests, or quite, quite mountains, such as you have not in England.

Robert says that if ‘Blackwood’ likes to print a poem of mine and send you the proofs, you will be so very good as to like to correct them.  To me it seems too much to ask, when you have work for him to do beside.  Will it be too much, or is nothing so to your kindness?  I would ask my other sisters, who would gladly, dear things, do it for me; but I have misgivings through their being so entirely unaccustomed to occupations of the sort, or any critical reading of poetry of any sort.  Robert is quite well and in the best spirits, and has the headache now only very occasionally.  I am as well as he, having quite recovered my strength and power of walking.  So we wander to the bridge of Trinita every evening after tea to see the sunset on the Arno.  May God bless you all!  Give my true love to your father and mother, and my loving thanks to yourself for that last stitch in the stool.  How good you are, Sarianna, to your ever affectionate sister

BA.

Always remind your dear mother that we are no more bound here than when in furnished lodgings.  It is a mere name.

To Mrs. Martin Palazzo Guidi:  June 20, [1848].