I say with the metaphysicians.  There’s something vital about this Florence air, for, though much given to resurrection, I never made such a leap in my life before after illness.  Robert and I need to run as well as leap.  We have quantities of work to do, and small time to do it in.  He is four hours a day engaged in dictating to a friend of ours who transcribes for him, and I am not even ready for transcription—­have not transcribed a line of my six or seven thousand.  We go to England, or at least to Paris, next month, but it can’t be early.  Oh, may we meet you!  Our little Penini is radiant, and altogether we are all in good spirits.  Which is a shame, you will say, considering the state of affairs at Sebastopol.  Forgive me.  I never, at worst, thought that the great tragedy of the world was going on there.  It was tragic, but there are more chronic cruelties and deeper despairs—­ay, and more exasperating wrongs.  For the rest, we have the most atrocious system in Europe, and we mean to work it out.  Oh, you will see.  Your committees nibble on, and this and that poisonous berry is pulled off leisurely, while the bush to the root of it remains, and the children eat on unhindered on the other side.  I had hoped that there was real feeling among politicians.  But no; we are put off with a fast day.  There, an end!  I begin to think that nothing will do for England but a good revolution, and a ’besom of destruction’ used dauntlessly.  We are getting up our vainglories again, smoothing our peacock’s plumes.  We shall be as exemplary as ever by next winter, you will see.

Meanwhile, dearest Mrs. Martin, that you should ask me about ‘Armageddon’ is most assuredly a sign of the times.  You know I pass for being particularly mad myself, and everybody, almost universally, is rather mad, as may be testified by the various letters I have to read about ‘visible spirit-hands,’ pianos playing themselves, and flesh-and-blood human beings floating about rooms in company with tables and lamps.  Dante has pulled down his own picture from the wall of a friend of ours in Florence five times, signifying his pleasure that it should be destroyed at once as unauthentic (our friend burnt it directly, which will encourage me to pull down mine by [word lost]).  Savonarola also has said one or two things, and there are gossiping guardian angels, of whom I need not speak.  Let me say, though, that nothing has surprised me quite so much as your inquiring about Armageddon, because I am used to think of you as the least in the world of a theorist, and am half afraid of you sometimes, and range the chairs before my speculative dark corners, that you may not think or see ’how very wild that Ba is getting!’ Well, now it shall be my turn to be sensible and unbelieving.  There’s a forced similitude certainly, in the etymology, between the two words; but if it were full and perfect I should be no nearer thinking that the battle of Armageddon could ever signify anything but