I say so, and there is an end.  It is relief to me, and will make no impression on you; but for my sake you permit me to say it, I feel sure.

Dear Mr. Chorley, Robert and I have had true pleasure (in spite of all this fault-finding) in feeling ourselves close to you in your book.  Volume after volume we have exchanged, talking of you, praising you here, blaming you there, but always feeling pleasure in reading your words and speaking your name.  Don’t say it’s the last novel.  You, who can do so much.  Write us another at once rather, doing justice to our sublime Azeglios and acute Cavours and energetic Farinis.  If I could hear an English statesman (Conservative or Liberal) speak out of a large heart and generous comprehension as I did Azeglio this last spring, I should thank God for it.  I fear I never shall.  My boy may, perhaps.  Red tape has garrotted this political generation....

I persist in being in high hopes for my Italy.

Ever affectionately yours
ELIZABETH B. BROWNING.

* * * * *

Early in December the move to Rome took place, and they found rooms at 28 Via del Tritone.  During the winter Mrs. Browning was preparing for the press her last volume, the ‘Poems before Congress,’ while her husband, in a fit of disinclination to write poetry, occupied himself by trying his hand at sculpture.

* * * * *

To Miss Browning

[Rome:  December 1859.]

Dearest Sarianna,—­Robert will have told you of the success of our journey, which the necessities of Mr. Landor very nearly pushed back into the cold too late.  We had even resolved that if the wind changed before morning we would accept it ‘as a sign’ and altogether give up Rome.  We were all but run to ground, you see.  Happily it didn’t end so; and here we are in a very nice sunny apartment, which would have been far beyond our means last year or any year except just now when the Pope’s obstinacy and the rumoured departure of the French have left Rome a solitude and called it peace—­very problematical peace. (Peni, in despair at leaving Florence, urged on us that ’for mama to have cold air in her chest would be better than to have a cannon-ball in her stomach’; but she was unreasonably more afraid of one than of the other.) Apartments here for which friends of ours paid forty pounds English the month last winter are going for fifteen or under—­or rather not going—­for nobody scarcely comes to take them.  The Pope’s ‘reforms’ seem to be limited, in spite of his alarming position, which is breaking his heart, he told a friend of Mrs. Stowe’s the other day, and out of which he looks to be relieved only by some special miracle (the American was quite affected to hear the old man bewail himself!), to an edict against crinolines, the same being forbidden to sweep the sacred pavement of St. Peter’s.  This is true, though it sounds like a joke.