of somebody.  Robert’s will, of course, be eminently saleable, and Wiedeman’s too, perhaps, for the beauty’s sake, with those blue far-reaching eyes, and that innocent angel face emplumed in the golden ringlets!  Somebody told me yesterday that she never had known, in a long experience of children, so attractive a child.  He is so full of sweetness and vivacity together, of imagination and grace.  A poetical child really, and in the best sense.  Such a piece of innocence and simplicity with it all, too!  A child you couldn’t lie to if you tried.  I had a fit of remorse for telling him the history of Jack and the Beanstalk, when he turned his earnest eyes up to me at the end and said, ‘I think, if Jack went up so high, he must have seen God.’

To see those two works through the press must be a fatigue to you in your present weak state, dearest friend, and I keep wishing vainly I could be of use to you in the matter of the proof sheets.  I might, you know, if I were in England.  I do some work myself, but doubt much whether I shall be ready for the printers by July; no, indeed, it is clear I shall not.  If Robert is, it will be well.  Doesn’t it surprise you that Alexander Smith should be already in a third edition?  I can’t make it out for my part.  I ‘give it up’ as is my way with riddles.  He is both too bad and too good to explain this phenomenon, which is harder to me than any implied in the turning tables or involuntary writing.  By the way, a lady whom I know here writes Greek without knowing or having ever known a single letter of it.  The unbelievers writhe under it.

Oh, I have been reading poor Haydon’s biography.  There is tragedy!  The pain of it one can hardly shake off.  Surely, surely, wrong was done somewhere, when the worst is admitted of Haydon.  For himself, looking forward beyond the grave, I seem to understand that all things when most bitter worked ultimate good to him, for that sublime arrogance of his would have been fatal perhaps to the moral nature if developed further by success.  But for the nation we had our duties, and we should not suffer our teachers and originators to sink thus.  It is a book written in blood of the heart.  Poor Haydon!

May God bless you, my dear friend!  I think of you and love you dearly, Robert’s love, put to mine, and Penini’s love put to Robert’s.  I give away Penini’s love as I please just now.

Your ever affectionate
E.B.B.

Send my bulletins; only two lines if you will.

* * * * *

To Miss Browning

[Rome:  about March, 1854.]