And why not say so sooner?  Just because I wanted to say so fully, and because I have been crushed into a corner past all elbow-room for doing anything largely and comfortably, by work and fuss and uncertainty of various kinds.  Now it isn’t any better scarcely, though it is quite fixed now that we are going from Florence to England—­no more of the shadow dancing which is so pretty at the opera and so fatiguing in real life.  We are coming, and have finished most of our preparations; conducted on a balance of—­must we go? may we stay? which is so very inconvenient.  If you knew what it is to give up this still dream-life of our Florence, where if one is over-busy ever, the old tapestries on the walls and the pre-Giotto pictures (picked up by my husband for so many pauls) surround us ready to quiet us again—­if you knew what it is to give it all up and be put into the mill of a dingy London lodging and ground very small indeed, you wouldn’t be angry with us for being sorry to go north—­you wouldn’t think it unnatural.  As for me, I have all sorts of pain in England—­everything is against me, except a few things; and yet, while my husband and I groan at one another, strophe and antistrophe (pardon that rag of Greek!) we admit our compensations—­that it will be an excellent thing, for instance, to see Mr. Ruskin!  Are we likely to undervalue that?

Let me consider how to answer your questions.  My poetry—­which you are so good to, and which you once thought ‘sickly,’ you say, and why not?  (I have often written sickly poetry, I do not doubt—­I have been sickly myself!)—­has been called by much harder names, ‘affected’ for instance, a charge I have never deserved, for I do think, if I may say it of myself, that the desire of speaking or spluttering the real truth out broadly, may be a cause of a good deal of what is called in me careless and awkward expression.  My friends took some trouble with me at one time; but though I am not self-willed naturally, as you will find when you know me, I hope, I never could adopt the counsel urged upon me to keep in sight always the stupidest person of my acquaintance in order to clear and judicious forms of composition.  Will you set me down as arrogant, if I say that the longer I live in this writing and reading world, the more convinced I am that the mass of readers never receive a poet (you, who are a poet yourself, must surely observe that) without intermediation?  The few understand, appreciate, and distribute to the multitude below.  Therefore to say a thing faintly, because saying it strongly sounds odd or obscure or unattractive for some reason, to ‘careless readers,’ does appear to me bad policy as well as bad art.  Is not art, like virtue, to be practised for its own sake first?  If we sacrifice our ideal to notions of immediate utility, would it not be better for us to write tracts at once?

Of course any remark of yours is to be received and considered with all reverence.  Only, be sure you please to say, ’Do it differently to satisfy me, John Ruskin,’ and not to satisfy Mr., Mrs., and the Miss and Master Smith of the great majority.  The great majority is the majority of the little, you know, who will come over to you if you don’t think of them—­and if they don’t, you will bear it.