Your ever affectionate Sister,
BA.

* * * * *

To Miss I. Blagden

Villa Alberti, Siena:  Wednesday [July-August 1859].

My ever dearest, kindest Isa,—­I can’t let another day go without writing just a word to you to say that I am alive enough to love you.  In fact, dear, I am a great deal better; no longer ground to dust with cough; able to sleep at nights; and preparing to-day to venture on a little minced chicken, which I have resisted all the advances of hitherto.  This proves my own opinion of myself, at least.  I am extremely weak, reeling when I ought to walk, and glad of an arm to steer by.  But the attack is over; the blister to the side, tell Dr. Gresonowsky, conquered the uneasiness there, and did me general good, I think.  Now I have only to keep still and quiet, and do nothing useful, or the contrary, if possible, and not speak, and not vex myself more than is necessary on politics.  I had a letter from Jessie Mario, dated Bologna, the other day, and feel a little uneasy at what she may be about there.  It was a letter not written in very good taste, blowing the trumpet against all Napoleonists.  Most absurd for the rest.  Cavour had promised L.N.  Tuscany for his cousin as the price of his intervention in Italy; and Prince Napoleon, finding on his arrival here that it ‘wouldn’t do,’ the peace was made in a huff.

Absurd, certainly.

Robert advises me not to answer, and it may be as well, perhaps.

I dreamed lately that I followed a mystic woman down a long suite of palatial rooms.  She was in white, with a white mask, on her head the likeness of a crown.  I knew she was Italy, but I couldn’t see through the mask.  All through my illness political dreams have repeated themselves, in inscrutable articles of peace and eternal provisional governments.  Walking on the mountains of the moon, hand in hand with a Dream more beautiful than them all, then falling suddenly on the hard earth-ground on one’s head, no wonder that one should suffer.  Oh, Isa, the tears are even now in my eyes to think of it!

And yet I have hope, and the more I consider, the more I hope.

There will be no intervention to interfere with us in Tuscany, and there is something better behind, which we none of us see yet.

We read to-day of the Florence elections.  May God bless my Florence!

Dearest Isa, don’t you fancy that you will get off with a day and night here.  No, indeed.  Also, I would rather you waited till I could talk, and go out, and enjoy you properly; and just now I am a mere rag of a Ba hung on a chair to be out of the way.

Robert is so very kind as to hear Pen’s lessons, which keeps me easy about the child.

Heat we have had and have; but there’s a great quantity of air—­such blowings as you boast of at your villa—­and I like this good open air and the quiet.  I have seen nobody yet....