Will you be among the likers or dislikers, I wonder sometimes, of Robert’s new book?  The faculty, you will recognise, in all cases; he can do anything he chooses.  I have complained of the asceticism in the second part, but he said it was ‘one side of the question.’  Don’t think that he has taken to the cilix—­indeed he has not—­but it is his way to see things as passionately as other people feel them....

Chapman & Hall offer us no copies, or you should have had one, of course.  So Wordsworth is gone—­a great light out of heaven.

May God bless you, my dear friend!

Love your affectionate and grateful, for so many reasons, BA.

The death of Wordsworth on April 23 left the Laureateship vacant, and though there was probably never any likelihood of Mrs. Browning’s being invited to succeed him, it is worth noticing that her claims were advocated by so prominent a paper as the ‘Athenaeum,’ which not only urged that the appointment would be eminently suitable under a female sovereign, but even expressed its opinion that ’there is no living poet of either sex who can prefer a higher claim than Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning.’  No doubt there would have been a certain appropriateness in the post of Laureate to a Queen being held by a poetess, but the claims of Tennyson to the primacy of English poetry were rightly regarded as paramount.  The fact that in Robert Browning there was a poet of equal calibre with Tennyson, though of so different a type, seems to have occurred to no one.

To Miss Mitford Florence:  June 15, 1850.

My ever dear Friend,—­How it grieves me that you should have been so unwell again!  From what you say about the state of the house, I conclude that your health suffers from that cause precisely; and that when you are warmly and dryly walled in, you will be less liable to these attacks, grievous to your friends as to you.  Oh, I don’t praise anybody, I assure you, for wishing to entice you to live near them.  We come over the Alps for a sunny climate; what should we not do for a moral atmosphere like yours?  I dare say you have chosen excellently your new residence, and I hope you will get over the fuss of it with great courage, remembering the advantages which it is likely to secure to you.  Tell me as much as you can about it all, that I may shift the scene in the right grooves, and be able to imagine you to myself out of Three Mile Cross.  You have the local feeling so eminently that I have long been resolved on never asking you to migrate.  Doves won’t travel with swallows; who should persuade them?  This is no migration—­only a shifting from one branch to another.  With Reading on one side of you still, you will lose nothing, neither sight nor friend.  Oh, do write to me as soon as you can, and say that the deepening summer has done you good and given you strength; say it, if possible.  I shall be very anxious for the next letter....