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To Madame Braun

2 Rue do Perry, Le Havre, Maison Versigny:  August 10 [1858].

My dearest Madame Braun,—­If you have not heard from me before, it has not been that I have not thought of you anxiously and tenderly, but I had the idea that so many must be thinking of you, and saying to you with sad faces ‘they were sorry,’ that I kept away, not to be the one too many.  It seems so vain when we sympathise with a suffering friend.  And yet it is something—­oh yes, I have felt that!  But you knew I must feel for you, if I teased you with words or not; and I, for my part, hearing of you from others, felt shy, as I say, till I heard you were better, of writing to you myself.  And you are feeling better, Mrs. Jameson tells me, and are somewhat more cheerful about your state.  I thank God for this good news....

One of the few reasons for which I regret our absence from England this summer is that I miss seeing you with my own eyes, and I should like much to see you and talk to you of things of interest to both of us.  If illness suppresses in us a few sources of pleasure, it leaves the real ich open to influences and keen-sighted to facts which are as surely natural as the fly’s wing, though we are apt to consider them vaguely as ‘supernatural.’

‘More and more life is what we want’ Tennyson wrote long ago, and that is the right want.  Indifference to life is disease, and therefore not strength.  But the life here is only half the apple—­a cut out of the apple, I should say, merely meant to suggest the perfect round of fruit—­and there is in the world now, I can testify to you, scientific proof that what we call death is a mere change of circumstances, a change of dress, a mere breaking of the outside shell and husk.  This subject is so much the most interesting to me of all, that I can’t help writing of it to you.  Among all the ways of progress along which the minds of men are moving, this draws me most.  There is much folly and fanaticism, unfortunately, because foolish men and women do not cease to be foolish when they hit upon a truth.  There was a man who hung bracelets upon plane trees.  But it was a tree—­it is a truth—­notwithstanding; yes, and so much a truth that in twenty years the probability is you will have no more doubters of the immortality of souls, and no more need of Platos to prove it.

We have come here to dip me in warm sea-water, in order to an improvement in strength, for I have been very weak and unwell of late, as perhaps Mrs. Jameson has told you.  But the sea and the change have brought me up again, as I hope they may yourself, and now I am looking forward to getting back to Italy for the winter, and perhaps to Rome.

Did you know Lady Elgin in Paris?  She has been hopelessly, in the opinion of her physicians, affected by paralysis, but is now better, her daughter writes to me.  A most remarkable person Lady Elgin is.  We left her sitting in her garden, not able to speak—­to articulate one word—­but with one of the most radiant happy faces I ever saw in man or woman.  I think I remember that you knew her.  Her salon was one of the most agreeable in Paris, and she herself, with her mixture of learning and simplicity, one of the most interesting persons in it....