May God bless both of you always!  I have pretty good letters from home.  Home! what’s home?

Your ever affectionate and grateful
BA.

Read ‘La Foi des Traites’; it is from the hand of Louis Napoleon.  So that I was prepared for the amnesty and for what follows.

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The following letters to Mr. Chorley relate to Mrs. Browning’s poem ’A Tale of Villafranca,’ which was published in the ‘Athenaeum’ for September 24, and subsequently included in the volume of ’Poems before Congress’ (Poetical Works, iv. 195).

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To Mr. Chorley

Villa Alberti, Siena:  September 12, [1859].

My dear Mr. Chorley,—­This isn’t a letter, as you will see at a glance.  I should have written to you long since, and have also sent this poem (which solicits a place in the ‘Athenaeum’) if I had not been very ill and been very slow in getting well.  We wanted to answer your kind letter, and shall.  As for my poem, be so good as to see it put in, in spite of its good and true politics, which you ‘Athenaeum’ people (being English) will dissent from altogether.  Say so, if you please, but let me in.  ‘Strike, but hear me.’  I have been living and dying for Italy lately.  You don’t know how vivid these things are to us, which serve for conversation at London dinner parties.

Ah—­dear Mr. Chorley.  The bad news about poor Lady Arnould will have affected you as it did Robert a few days ago.  I do pity so our unhappy friend, Sir Joseph.  Tell us, if you can and will, what you hear.

We came here from Florence five or six weeks since, when I was very unfit for moving, but change of air and a cooler air and repose had grown necessary.  We are at a villa two miles from Siena, where we look at scarlet sunsets, over purple hills, and have the wind nearly all day.  Mr. and Mrs. Story are half a mile off in another villa, and Mr. Landor at a stone’s cast.  Otherwise the solitude is absolute.  Mr. Russell spent two days with us on his way to resume office at Rome.  I should remember that....

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To Mr. Chorley

Siena:  Sunday [September-October 1859].

Thank you, my dear Mr. Chorley, I submit gratefully to being snubbed for my politics.  In return I will send to your private ear an additional stanza which should interpose as the real seventh but was left out.  I did not send it to you the day after my note, though sorely tempted to do so, because it seemed to me likely to annul any small chance of ‘Athenaeum’ tolerance which might fall to me.  Would it have done so, do you think?

    ’A great deed in this world of ours! 
      Unheard of the pretence is. 
    It plainly threatens the Great Powers;
      Is fatal in all senses. 
    A just deed in the world!  Call out
    The rifles! ... be not slack about
      The National Defences.’