Your generous sympathy, my dear Mrs. Kinney, would have made me glad yesterday, if I had not been so very, very sad with some news of the day before, telling me of the loss of the loved friend to whom that book is dedicated.  So sad I was that I could not lift up my head to write and express to you how gratefully I felt the recognition of your letter.  You are most generous—­overflowingly generous.  If I said I wished to deserve it better, it would be like wishing you less generous; so I won’t.  I will only thank you from my heart; that shall be all I shall say.

Affectionately yours always,
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

* * * * *

To Mrs. Jameson

Florence:  December 26, 1856 [postmark].

My ever dear Friend,—­To have three letters from you all unanswered seems really to discredit me to myself, while it gives such proof of your kindness and affection.  No other excuse is to be offered but the sort of interruption which sadness gives.  I really had not the heart to sit down and talk of my ‘Aurora,’ even in reference to the pleasure and honour brought to me by the expression of your opinion, when the beloved friend associated with the poor book was lost to me in this world, gone where perhaps he no longer sympathises with pleasure or honour of mine, now—­for nearly the first time. Perhaps. After such separations the sense of distance is the thing felt first.  And certainly my book at least is naturally saddened to me, and the success of it wholesomely spoiled.

Yet your letter, my dearest Mona Nina, arrived in time to give me great, great pleasure—­true pleasure indeed, and most tenderly do I thank you for it.  I have had many of such letters from persons loved less, and whose opinions had less weight; and you will like to hear that in a fortnight after publication Chapman had to go to press with the second edition.  In fact, the kind of reception given to the book has much surprised me, as I was prepared for an outcry of quite another kind, and extravagances in a quite opposite sense.  This has been left, however, to the ‘Press,’ the ‘Post,’ and the ‘Tablet,’ who calls ‘Aurora’ ’a brazen-faced woman,’ and brands the story as a romance in the manner of Frederic Soulie—­in reference, of course, to its gross indecency.

I can’t leave this subject without noticing (by the way) what you say of the likeness to the catastrophe of ‘Jane Eyre.’  I have sent to the library here for ‘Jane Eyre’ (but haven’t got it yet) in order to refresh my memory on this point; but, as far as I do recall the facts, the hero was monstrously disfigured and blinded in a fire the particulars of which escape me, and the circumstance of his being hideously scarred is the thing impressed chiefly on the reader’s mind; certainly it remains innermost in mine.  Now if you read over again those pages of my poem, you will find that the only injury received by Romney in the fire was from a blow