I must tell you how Rome made me some amends after all.  Page, the American artist, painted a picture of Robert like an Italian, and then presented it to me like a prince.  It is a wonderful picture, the colouring so absolutely Venetian that artists can’t (for the most part) keep their temper when they look at it, and the breath of the likeness is literal.[35] Mr. Page has secrets in the art—­certainly nobody else paints like him—­and his nature, I must say, is equal to his genius and worthy of it.  Dearest Miss Mitford, the ‘Athenaeum’ is always as frigid as Mont Blanc; it can’t be expected to grow warmer for looking over your green valleys and still waters.  It wouldn’t be Alpine if it did.  They think it a point of duty in that journal to shake hands with one finger.  I dare say when Mr. Chorley sits down to write an article he puts his feet in cold water as a preliminary.  Still, I oughtn’t to be impertinent.  He has been very good-natured to me, and it isn’t his fault if I’m not Poet Laureate at this writing, and engaged in cursing the Czar in Pindarics very prettily.  ‘Atherton,’ meanwhile, wants nobody to praise it, I am sure.  How glad I shall be to seize and read it, and how I thank you for the gift!  May God bless and keep you!  I may hear again if you write soon to Florence, but don’t pain yourself for the world, I entreat you.  I shall see you before long, I think.

Your ever affectionate
E.B.B.

Robert’s love.

* * * * *

To Miss Mitford

Florence:  July 20, [1854].

My dearest Miss Mitford,—­I this moment receive your little note.  It makes me very sad and apprehensive about you, and I would give all this bright sunshine for weeks for one explanatory word which might make me more easy.  Arabel speaks of receiving your books—­I suppose ’Atherton’—­and of having heard from yourself a very bad account of your state of health.  Are you worse, my beloved friend?  I have been waiting to hear the solution of our own plans (dependent upon letters from England) in order to write to you; and when I found our journey to London was definitively rendered impossible till next spring, I deferred writing yet again, it was so painful to me to say to you that our meeting could not take place this year.  Now, I receive your little note and write at once to say how sad that makes me.  It is the first time that the expression of your love, my beloved friend, has made me sad, and I start as from an omen.  On the other hand, the character you write in is so firm and like yourself, that I do hope and trust you are not sensibly worse.  Let me hear by a word, if possible, that the change of weather has done you some little good.  I understand there has scarcely been any summer in England, and this must necessarily have been adverse to you.  A gleam of fine weather would revive you by God’s help.  Oh, that I could look in your face and say, ‘God bless you!’ as I feel it.  May God bless you, my dear, dear friend.