not see his Peni this year, and that you, dear, should be disappointed, on my account again.  That’s hard on us all.  We came home into a cloud here.  I can scarcely command voice or hand to name Cavour.[104] That great soul, which meditated and made Italy, has gone to the Diviner country.  If tears or blood could have saved him to us, he should have had mine.  I feel yet as if I could scarcely comprehend the greatness of the vacancy.  A hundred Garibaldis for such a man.  There is a hope that certain solutions had been prepared between him and the Emperor, and that events will slide into their grooves.  May God save Italy!  Dear M. Milsand had pleased me so by his appreciation, but there are great difficulties.  The French press, tell him, has, on the whole, done great service, except that part of it under the influence of the ultramontane and dynastic opposition parties.  And as to exaggerated statements, it is hard, even here, to get at the truth (with regard to the state of the south), and many Italian liberals have had hours of anxiety and even of despondency.  English friends of ours, very candid and liberal, have gone to Naples full of hope, and returned hoping nothing—­yet they are wrong, unless this bitter loss makes them right—­

Your loving BA—­

Robert tears me away—­

* * * * *

With this letter the correspondence of Mrs. Browning, so far, at least, as it is extant or accessible, comes to an end.  The journey to Paris had been abandoned, but it does not appear that there was any cause to apprehend that her life could now be reckoned only by days.  Yet so it was.  For the past three years, it is evident, her strength had been giving way.  Attacks of physical illness weakened her, without being followed by any adequate rally; but more than all, the continuous stress and strain of mental anxiety wore her strength away.  The war of 1859, the liberation of Sicily and Naples, the intense irritation of feeling in connection with English opinion of Louis Napoleon and his policy, the continual ebb and flow of rumours concerning Venetia and the Papal States, the illness and death of her sister Henrietta—­all these sources of anxiety told terribly on her sensitive, emotional mind, and thereby on her enfeebled body.  The fragility of her appearance had always struck strangers.  So far back as 1851, Bayard Taylor remarked that ’her frame seemed to be altogether disproportionate to her soul.’  Her ‘fiery soul’ did, indeed, with a far more literal truth than can often be the case, fret her ‘puny body to decay, and o’er-informed its tenement of clay.’  Her last illness—­or, it may more truly be said, the last phase of that illness which had been present with her for years—­was neither long nor severe; but she had no more strength left to resist it.  Shortly after her return to Casa Guidi another bronchial attack developed itself, to all appearance just like many others that she had had before; but this time there was no recovery.