sea serpent!  I agree with you that much of all is very melancholy and disheartening, though holding fast by my hope and belief that good will be the end, as it always is God’s end to man’s frenzies, and that all we observe is but the fermentation necessary to the new wine, which presently we shall drink pure.  Meanwhile, the saddest thing is the impossibility (which I, for one, feel) to sympathise, to go along with, the people to whom and to whose cause all my natural sympathies yearn.  The word ‘Liberty’ ceases to make me thrill, as at something great and unmistakable, as, for instance, the other great words Truth, and Justice; do.  The salt has lost its savour, the meaning has escaped from the term; we know nothing of what people will do when they aspire to Liberty.  The holiness of liberty is desecrated by the sign of the ass’s hoof.  Fixed principles, either of opinion or action, seem clearly gone out of the world.  The principle of Destruction is in the place of the principle of Re-integration, or of Radical Reform, as we called it in England.  I look all round and can sympathise nowhere.  The rulers hold by rottenness, and the people leap into the abyss, and nobody knows why this is, or why that is.  As to France, my tears (which I really couldn’t help at the time of the expulsion of poor Louis Philippe and his family, not being very strong just then) are justified, it appears, though my husband thought them foolish (and so did I), and though we both began by an adhesion to the Republic in the cordial manner.  But, just see, the Republic was a ’man in an iron mask’ or helmet, and turns out a military dictatorship, a throttling of the press, a starving of the finances, and an election of Louis Napoleon to be President.  Louis Philippe was better than all this, take him at worst, and at worst he did not deserve the mud and stones cast at him, which I have always maintained and maintain still.  England might have got up (’happy country’) more crying grievances than France at the moment of outbreak; but what makes outbreaks now-a-days is not ‘the cause, my soul,’ but the stuff of the people.  You are huckaback on the other side of the Channel, and you wear out the poor Irish linen, let the justice of the case be what it may.  Politics enough and too much, surely, especially now when they are depressing to you, and more or less to everybody....  We are still in the slow agonies of furnishing our apartment.  You see, being the poorest and most prudent of possible poets, we had to solve the problem of taking our furniture out of our year’s income (proceeds of poems and the like), and of not getting into debt.  Oh, I take no credit to myself; I was always in debt in my little way (’small im morals,’ as Dr. Bowring might call it) before I married, but Robert, though a poet and dramatist by profession, being descended from the blood of all the Puritans, and educated by the strictest of dissenters, has a sort of horror about the dreadful fact of owing five