no true poet, having claims upon attention solely through his poetry, has attained so certain a success with such short delay.  Instead of being pelted (as nearly every true poet has been), he stands already on a pedestal, and is recognised as a master spirit not by a coterie but by the great public.  Three large editions of the ‘Princess’ have already been sold.  If he isn’t satisfied after all, I think he is wrong.  Divine poet as he is, and no laurel being too leafy for him, yet he must be an unreasonable man, and not understanding of the growth of the laurel trees and the nature of a reading public.  With regard to the other garden-digger, dear Mr. Home, I wish as you do that I could hear something satisfactory of him.  I wrote from Lucca in the summer, and have no answer.  The latest word concerning him is the announcement in the ‘Athenaeum’ of a third edition of his ’Gregory the Seventh,’ which we were glad to see, but very, very glad we should be to have news of his prosperity in the flesh as well as in the litterae scriptae....

I have not been out of doors these two months, but people call me ‘looking well,’ and a newly married niece of Miss Bayley’s, the accomplished Miss Thomson, who has become the wife of Dr. Emil Braun (the learned German secretary of the Archaeological Society), and just passed through Florence on her way to Rome, where they are to reside, declared that the change she saw in me was miraculous—­’wonderful indeed.’  I took her to look at Wiedeman in his cradle, fast asleep, and she won my heart (over again, for always she was a favorite of mine) by exclaiming at his prettiness.  Charmed, too, we both were with Dr. Braun—­I mean Robert and I were charmed.  He has a mixture of fervour and simplicity which is still more delightfully picturesque in his foreign English.  Oh, he speaks English perfectly, only with an obvious accent enough.  I am sure we should be cordial friends, if the lines had fallen to us in the same pleasant places; but he is fixed at Rome, and we are half afraid of the enervating effects of the Roman climate on the constitutions of children.  Tell me, do you hear often from Mr. Chorley?  It quite pains us to observe from his manner of writing the great depression of his spirits.  His mother was ill in the summer, but plainly the sadness does not arise entirely or chiefly from this cause.  He seems to me over-worked, taxed in the spirit.  I advise nobody to give up work; but that ‘Athenaeum’ labour is a sort of treadmill discipline in which there is no progress, nor triumph, and I do wish he would give that up and come out to us with a new set of anvils and hammers.  Only, of course, he couldn’t do it, even if he would, while there is illness in his family.  May there be a whole sun of success shining on the new play!  Robert is engaged on a poem,[194] and I am busy with my edition.  So much to correct, I find, and many poems to add.  Plainly ‘Jane Eyre’ was by a woman.  It used to astound me when sensible people said otherwise.  Write to me, will you?  I long to hear again.  Tell me everything of yourself; accept my husband’s true regards, and think of me as your