care as may be.  Now, would it not do infinite good to Lady Byron if you could carry her with you into the sun?  Surely it would do her great good; the change, the calm, the atmosphere of beauty and brightness, which harmonises so wonderfully with every shade of human feeling.  Florence just now, and thanks to the panic, is tolerably clean of the English—­you scarcely see an English face anywhere—­and perhaps this was a circumstance that helped to give Robert courage to take our apartment here and ‘settle down.’  You were surprised at so decided a step I dare say, and, I believe, though too considerate to say it in your letter, you have wondered in your thoughts at our fixing at Florence instead of Rome, and without seeing more of Italy before the finality of making a choice.  But observe, Florence is wonderfully cheap, one lives here for just nothing; and the convenience in respect to England, letters, and the facility of letting our house in our absence, is incomparable altogether.  At Rome a house would be habitable only half the year, and the distance and the expense are objections at the first sight of the subject....  Altogether, if I could but get a supply of French books, turning the cock easily, it would be perfect; but as to anything new in the book way, Vieusseux seems to have made a vow against it, and poor Robert comes and goes in a state of desperation between me and the bookseller (’But what can I do, Ba?’), and only brings news of some pitiful revolution or other which promises a full flush of republican virtues and falls off into the fleur de lis as usual.  Think of our not having read ‘Lucretia’ yet—­George Sand’s.  And Balzac is six or seven works deep from us; but these are evils to be borne.  We live on just in the same way, having very few visitors, and receiving them in the quietest of hospitalities.  Mr. Ware, the American, who wrote the ‘Letters from Palmyra,’ and is a delightful, earnest, simple person, comes to have coffee with us once or twice a week, and very much we like him.  Mr. Hillard, another cultivated American friend of ours, you have in London, and we should gladly have kept longer.  Mr. Powers does not spend himself much upon visiting, which is quite right, but we do hope to see a good deal of Mademoiselle de Fauveau.  Robert exceedingly admires her.  As to Italian society, one may as well take to longing for the evening star, for it seems quite as inaccessible; and indeed, of society of any sort, we have not much, nor wish for it, nor miss it.  Dearest friend, if I could open my heart to you in all seriousness, you would see nothing there but a sort of enduring wonder of happiness—­yes, and some gratitude, I do hope, besides.  Could everything be well in England, I should only have to melt out of the body at once in the joy and the glow of it.  Happier and happier I have been, month after month; and when I hear him talk of being happy too, my very soul seems to swim round with feelings which cannot