a great spiritual strife.  The terms, taken from a symbolical book, are plainly to my mind symbolical, and Dr. Cumming and a thousand mightier doctors could not talk it out of me, I think.  I don’t, for the rest, like Dr. Cumming; his books seem to me very narrow.  Isn’t the tendency with us all to magnify the great events of our own time, just as we diminish the small events?  For me, I am heretical in certain things.  I expect no renewal of the Jewish kingdom, for instance.  And I doubt much whether Christ’s ‘second coming’ will be personal.  The end of the world is probably the end of a dispensation.  What I expect is, a great development of Christianity in opposition to the churches, and of humanity generally in opposition to the nations, and I look out for this in much quiet hope.  Also, and in the meanwhile, the war seems to be just and necessary.  There is nothing in it to regret, except the way of conducting it....

Write to me soon again, and tell me as much of both of you as you can put into a letter.

May God bless you always!

With Robert’s warm regards, both of you think of me as

Your ever affectionate
BA.

* * * * *

To Mrs. Braun

Florence:  May 13, [1855].

My dearest Madame Braun,—­You have classed me and ticketed me before now, I think, as among the ungrateful of the world; yet I am grateful, grateful, grateful!  When your book[42] came (how very kind you were to send it to me!) and when I had said so some five times running, in came somebody who was fanatico per Roma, and reverential in proportion for Dr. Braun, who with some sudden appeal to my sensibility—­the softer just then that I was only just recovering strength after a sharp winter attack—­swept the volume off the table and carried it off out of the house to study the contents at leisure.  I expected it back the next week, but it lingered.  And I really hadn’t the audacity to write to you and say, ‘Thank you, but I have looked as yet simply at the title-page.’  Well, at last it comes home, and I turn the leaves, examine, read, approve, like Ludovisi and the Belvedere, with a double pleasure of association and become qualified properly to thank you and Dr. Braun from Robert and myself for this gift to us and valuable contribution to archaeological literature.  I am only sorry I did not get to Rome after the book; it would have helped my pleasure so, holding up the lanthorn in dark places.  So much suggestiveness in combination with so much specific information makes a book (or a man) worth knowing.