To Miss Browning

Florence:  June 12, 1855 [postmark].

How kind and tender of you, my dearest Sarianna, to care so much to hear that I am better!  I was afraid that Robert had written in the Crimean style about me, for he was depressed and uneasy, poor darling, and looked at things from the blackest point of view.  Nevertheless, I have escaped some bad symptoms.  No spitting of blood, for instance, no loss of voice, and scarcely a threatening of pain in the side.  Also I have not grown thinner than is natural under the circumstances.  At Genoa (after our cold journey[45]) I wasted in a few days, and thought much worse of myself than there was reason to do this time.

I can assure you I am now much restored.  The cough is decidedly got under, and teases me, for the most part, only in the early morning; the fever is gone, and the nights are quiet.  I am able to take animal food again, and shall soon recover my ordinary strength.  Certainly it has been a bad attack, and I never suffered anything like it in Italy before.  The illness at Genoa was the mere tail of what began in England, and was increased by the Alpine exposure.  Our weather has been very severe—­wind and frost together—­something peculiarly irritating in the air.  I am loth to blame my poor Florence, who never treated me so before (and how many winters we have spent here!)—­and our friends write from Pisa that the weather was as trying there, while from Rome the account is simply ‘detestable weather.’  At Naples it is sometimes furiously cold; there’s no perfect climate anywhere, that’s certain.  You have only to choose the least evil.  Here for the last week it has been so mild that, if I had been in my usual state of health, I might have gone out, they say; and, of course, I have felt the influence beneficially.  One encourages oneself in Italy when it is cold, with the assurance that it can’t last.  Our misfortune this time has been that it has lasted unusually long.  How the Italians manage without fires I cannot make out.  So chilly as they are, too, it’s a riddle.

You would wonder almost how I could feel the cold in these two rooms opening into each other, and from which I have not stirred since the cold weather began.  Robert has kept up the fire in our bedroom throughout the night.  Oh, he has been spoiling me so.  If it had not been that I feared much to hurt him in having him so disturbed and worried, it would have been a very subtle luxury to me, this being ill and feeling myself dear.  Do not set me down as too selfish.  May God bless him!...

Robert has been frantic about the Crimea, and ’being disgraced in the face of Europe,’ &c. &c.  When he is mild he wishes the ministry to be torn to pieces in the streets, limb from limb.  I do not doubt that the Aberdeen side of the Cabinet has been greatly to blame, but the system is the root of the whole evil; if they don’t tear up the system they may tear up the Aberdeens ‘world