As for me, I can’t write to-day.  Your little precious, melancholy note hangs round the neck of my heart like a stone.  Arabel simply says she is afraid from what you have written to her that you must be very ill; she does not tell me what you wrote to her—­perhaps for fear of paining me—­and now I am pained by the silence beyond measure.

Robert’s love and warmest wishes for you.  He appreciates your kind word to him.  And I, what am I to say?  I love you from a very sad and grateful heart, looking backwards and forwards—­and upwards to pray God’s love down on you!

Your ever affectionate
E.B.B., rather BA.

Precious the books will be to me.  I hope not to wait to read them till they reach me, as there is a bookseller here who will be sure to have them.  Thank you, thank you.

* * * * *

To Miss Mitford

Florence:  September 4, 1854.

Five minutes do not pass, my beloved friend, since reading this dear letter which has wrung from me tender and sorrowful tears, and answering it thus.  Pray for you?  I do not wait that you should bid me.  May the divine love in the face of our Lord Jesus Christ shine upon you day and night, and make all our human loves strike you as cold and dull in comparison with that ineffable tenderness!  As to wandering prayers, I cannot believe that it is of consequence whether this poor breath of ours wanders or does not wander.  If we have strength to throw ourselves upon Him for everything, for prayer, as well as for the ends of prayer, it is enough, and He will prove it to be enough presently.  I have been when I could not pray at all.  And then God’s face seemed so close upon me that there was no need of prayer, any more than if I were near you, as I yearn to be, as I ought to be, there would be need for this letter.  Oh, be sure that He means well by us by what we suffer, and it is when we suffer that He often makes the meaning clearer.  You know how that brilliant, witty, true poet Heine, who was an atheist (as much as a man can pretend to be), has made a public profession of a change of opinion which was pathetic to my eyes and heart the other day as I read it.  He has joined no church, but simply (to use his own words) has ’returned home to God like the prodigal son after a long tending of the swine.’  It is delightful to go home to God, even after a tending of the sheep.  Poor Heine has lived a sort of living death for years, quite deprived of his limbs, and suffering tortures to boot, I understand.  It is not because we are brought low that we must die, my dearest friend.  I hope—­I do not say ‘hope’ for you so much as for me and for the many who hang their hearts on your life—­I hope that you may survive all these terrible sufferings and weaknesses, and I take my comfort from your letter, from the firmness and beauty of the manuscript; I who know how weak hands will shudder and reel along the paper.  Surely there is strength for more life in that hand.  Now I stoop to kiss it in my thought.  Feel my kiss on the dear hand, dear, dear friend.