If you can read novels, and you have too much sense not to be fond of them, read ‘Villette.’  The scene of the greater part of it is in Belgium, and I think it a strong book.  ‘Ruth,’ too, by Mrs. Gaskell, the author of ‘Mary Barton,’ has pleased me very much.  Do you know the French novels? there’s passion and power for you, if you like such things.  Balzac convinced me that the French language was malleable into poetry.  We are behindhand here in books, and elderly ones seem young to us.  For instance, we have not caught sight yet of ‘Moore’s Life,’ the extracts from which are unpropitious, I think.  I had a fancy, I cannot tell you how it grew, that Moore, though an artificial, therefore inferior, poet, was a most brilliant letter-writer.  His letters are disappointing, and his mean clinging to the aristocracy still more so.

I wish you could suddenly walk into this valley, which seems to have been made by the flashing scimitar of the river that cuts through the mountain.  Ah! you in England, and in Belgium still less, do not know what scenery is, what Nature is when she is natural.  You could as soon guess at a tiger from the cat on the hearthstone.  You do not know; but, being a poet, you can dream.  You have divine insights, as we all have, of heaven, all of us with whom the mortal mind does not cake and obstruct into cecity.  No, no, no.  I protest against anything I have not reprinted.  The Prometheus poems bear the mark of their time, which was one of greenness and immaturity.  Indeed, the responsibility for what I acknowledge in print is hard enough to bear.  Don’t put another stick on the overloaded—­ass, shall I say candidly?

* * * * *

To Mrs. Martin

Bagni di Lucca:  October 5, [1853].

My dearest Mrs. Martin, I am delighted to have your letter at last, and should have come upon you like a storm in a day or two if you hadn’t written, for really I began to be low in patience.  Also, after having spent the summer here, we were about to turn our faces to Florence again, and it was necessary to my own satisfaction to let you know of our plans for the winter.  To begin with those, then, we go to Florence, as I said, from hence, and after a week or two, or three or four as it may be, the briefer time if we let our house, we proceed to Rome for some months.  You see we must visit Rome before we go northwards, and northwards we must go in the spring, so that the logic of events seems to secure Rome to us this time; otherwise I should still doubt of our going there, so often have we been on the verge and caught back....