injury correct itself.  You must have a strong, energetic vitality; and, after all, spinal disorders do not usually attack life, though they disable and overthrow.  The pain you endure is the terrible thing.  Has a local application of chloroform been ever tried?  I catch at straws, perhaps, with my unlearned hands, but it’s the instinct of affection.  While you suffer, my dear friend, the world is applauding you.  I catch sight of stray advertisements and fragmentary notices of ‘Atherton,’ which seems to have been received everywhere with deserved claps of hands.  This will not be comfort to you, perhaps; but you will feel the satisfaction which every workman feels in successful work.  I think the edition of plays and poems has not yet appeared, and I suppose there will be nothing in that which can be new to us.  ‘Atherton’ I thirst for, but the cup will be dry, I dare say, till I get to England, for new books even at Florence take waiting for far beyond all necessary bounds.  We shall not stay long in Tuscany.  We want to be in England late in June or very early in July, and some days belong to Paris as we pass, since Robert’s family are resident there.  To leave Rome will fill me with barbarian complacency.  I don’t pretend to have a rag of sentiment about Rome.  It’s a palimpsest Rome—­a watering-place written over the antique—­and I haven’t taken to it as a poet should, I suppose; only let us speak the truth, above all things.  I am strongly a creature of association, and the associations of the place have not been personally favorable to me.  Among the rest my child, the light of my eyes, has been more unwell lately than I ever saw him in his life, and we were forced three times to call in a physician.  The malady was not serious, it was just the result of the climate, relaxation of the stomach, &c., but the end is that he is looking a delicate, pale, little creature, he who was radiant with all the roses and stars of infancy but two months ago.  The pleasantest days in Rome we have spent with the Kembles—­the two sisters—­who are charming and excellent, both of them, in different ways; and certainly they have given us some exquisite hours on the Campagna, upon picnic excursions, they and certain of their friends—­for instance, M. Ampere, the member of the French Institute, who is witty and agreeable; M. Gorze, the Austrian Minister, also an agreeable man; and Mr. Lyons, the son of Sir Edmund, &c.  The talk was almost too brilliant for the sentiment of the scenery, but it harmonised entirely with the mayonnaise and champagne.  I should mention, too, Miss Hosmer (but she is better than a talker), the young American sculptress, who is a great pet of mine and of Robert’s, and who emancipates the eccentric life of a perfectly ‘emancipated female’ from all shadow of blame by the purity of hers.  She lives here all alone (at twenty-two); dines and breakfasts at the cafes precisely as a young man would; works from six o’clock in the morning till night,