Your ever affectionate
BA.

* * * * *

The end of the time at the Bagni di Lucca was clouded by another anxiety, caused by the illness of Penini.  It was not, however, a long one, and early in October the whole party was able to return to Florence, where they remained throughout the winter and the following spring.  Letters of this period are, however, scarce, and there is nothing particular to record concerning it.  Since the publication of ‘Aurora Leigh,’ Mrs. Browning had been taking a holiday from poetical composition; indeed she never resumed it on a large scale, and published no other volume save the ‘Poems before Congress,’ which were the fruit of a later period of special excitement.  She had put her whole self into ‘Aurora Leigh,’ and seemed to have no further message to give to mankind.  It is evident, too, that her strength was already beginning to decline and the various family and public anxieties which followed 1856 made demands on what remained of it too great to allow of much application to poetry.

* * * * *

To Miss E.F.  Haworth

[Bagni di Lucca:] Monday, September 28, [1857].

You will understand too well why I have waited some days before answering your letter, dearest Fanny, though you bade me write at once, when I tell you that my own precious Penini has been ill with gastric fever and is even now confined to his bed.  Eleven days ago, when he was looking like a live rose and in an exaggeration of spirits, he proposed to go with me, to run by my portantina in which I went to pay a visit some mile and a half away.  The portantini men walked too fast for him, and he was tired and heated.  Then, while I paid my visit, he played by the river with a child of the house, and returned with me in the dusk.  He complained of being tired during the return, and I took him up into my portantina for ten minutes.  He was over-tired, however, over-heated, over-chilled, and the next day had fever and complained of his head.  We did not think much of it; and the morning after he seemed so recovered that we took him with us to dine in the mountains with some American friends (the Eckleys—­did you hear of them in Rome?)—­twenty miles in the carriage, and ten miles on donkey-back.  He was in high spirits, and came home at night singing at the top of his voice—­probably to keep off the creeping sense of illness, for he has confessed since that he felt unwell even then.  The next day the fever set in.  The medical man doubted whether it was measles, scarlatina, or what; but soon the symptoms took the decisive aspect.  He has been in bed, strictly confined to bed, since last Sunday-week night—­strictly confined, except for one four hours, after which exertion he had a relapse.  It is the same fever as Mr. Lytton’s, only not as severe, I thank God; the attacks coming on at nights chiefly, and terrifying us, as you may suppose.  The child’s sweetness and goodness,