To Miss Mitford

Florence:  June 6, 1854.

Yes, dearest friend, I had your few lines which Arabel sent to me.  I had them on the very day I had posted my letter to you, and I need not say how deeply it moved me that you should have thought of giving me that pleasure of Mr. Ruskin’s kind word at the expense of what I knew to be so much pain to yourself....

We mean to stay at Florence a week or two longer and then go northward.  I love Florence, the place looks exquisitely beautiful in its garden-ground of vineyards and olive trees, sung round by the nightingales day and night, nay, sung into by the nightingales, for as you walk along the streets in the evening the song trickles down into them till you stop to listen.  Such nights we have between starlight and firefly-light, and the nightingales singing!  I would willingly stay here, if it were not that we are constrained by duty and love to go, and at some day not distant, I daresay we shall come back ‘for good and all’ as people say, seeing that if you take one thing with another, there is no place in the world like Florence, I am persuaded, for a place to live in.  Cheap, tranquil, cheerful, beautiful, within the limit of civilisation yet out of the crush of it.  I have not seen the Trollopes yet; but we have spent two delicious evenings at villas on the outside the gates, one with young Lytton, Sir Edward’s son, of whom I have told you, I think.  I like him, we both do, from the bottom of our hearts.  Then our friend Frederick Tennyson, the new poet, we are delighted to see again.  Have you caught sight of his poems?  If you have, tell me your thought.  Mrs. Howe’s I have read since I wrote last.  Some of them are good—­many of the thoughts striking, and all of a certain elevation.  Of poetry, however, strictly speaking, there is not much; and there’s a large proportion of conventional stuff in the volume.  She must be a clever woman.  Of the ordinary impotencies and prettinesses of female poets she does not partake, but she can’t take rank with poets in the good meaning of the word, I think, so as to stand without leaning.  Also there is some bad taste and affectation in the dressing of her personality.  I dare say Mr. Fields will bring you her book.  Talking of American literature, with the publishers on the back of it, we think of offering the proofs of our new works to any publisher over the water who will pay us properly for the advantage of bringing out a volume in America simultaneously with the publication in England.  We have heard that such a proposal will be acceptable, and mean to try it.  The words you sent to me from Mr. Ruskin gave me great pleasure indeed, as how should they not from such a man?  I like him personally, too, besides my admiration for him as a writer, and I was deeply gratified in every way to have his approbation.  His ‘Seven Lamps’ I have not read yet.  Books come out slowly to Italy.  It’s our disadvantage, as you know.  Ruskin and art go together.