written before she left Florence, was not ready for printing until the following year.  They travelled direct from Florence to London, arriving there apparently in the course of July, and taking up their quarters at 13 Dorset Street.  Their stay there was made memorable, as Mrs. Browning records below, by a visit from Tennyson, who read to them, on September 27, his new poem of ‘Maud;’ and it was while he was thus employed that Rossetti drew a well-known portrait of the Laureate in pen and ink.  But in spite of glimpses of Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle, Kenyon, and other friends, the visit to England was, on the whole, a painful one to Mrs. Browning.  Intercourse with her own family did not run smooth.  One sister was living at too great a distance to see her; the other was kept out of her reach, for a considerable part of the time, by her father.  In addition, a third member of the Barrett family, her brother Alfred, earned excommunication from his father’s house by the unforgivable offence of matrimony.  Altogether it was not without a certain feeling of relief that, in the middle of October, Mrs. Browning, with her husband and child, left England for Paris.  The whole visit had been so crowded with work and social engagements as to leave little time for correspondence; and the letters for the period are consequently few and short.

* * * * *

To Mrs. Martin

13 Dorset Street, Baker Street:  Tuesday, [July-August 1855].

My dearest Mrs. Martin,—­I have waited days and days in the answering of your dear, kind, welcoming letter, and yet I have been very very grateful for it.  Thank you.  I need such things in England above other places.

For the rest, we could not go to Herefordshire, even if I were rational, which I am not; I could as soon open a coffin as do it:  there’s the truth.  The place is nothing to me, of course, only the string round a faggot burnt or scattered.  But if I went there, the thought of one face which never ceases to be present with me (and which I parted from for ever in my poor blind unconsciousness with a pettish word) would rise up, put down all the rest, and prevent my having one moment of ordinary calm intercourse with you, so don’t ask me; set it down to mania or obstinacy, but I never could go into that neighbourhood, except to die, which I think sometimes I should like.  So you may have me some day when the physicians give me up, but then, you won’t, you know, and it wouldn’t, any way, be merry visiting.

Foolish to write all this!  As if any human being could know thoroughly what he was to me.  It must seem so extravagant, and perhaps affected, even to you, who are large-hearted and make allowances.  After these years!