Dear Isa Blagden is spending the summer in a rough cabin, a quarter of an hour’s walk from here, and Mr. Landor is hard by in the lane.  This (with the Storys a mile off) makes a sort of colonisation of the country here.  Otherwise it’s a solitude, ‘very triste,’ say the English, not even an English church, even in the city of Siena.  We get books from Florence, and newspapers from everywhere, or one couldn’t get on quite well.  As it is I like it very much.  I like the quiet! the lying at length on a sofa, in an absolute silence, nobody speaking for hours together (Robert rides a great deal), not a chance of morning visitors, no voices under the windows.  The repose would help me much, if it were not that circumstances of pain and fear walk in upon me through windows and doors, using one’s own thoughts, till they tremble.  Pen has had an abbe to teach him Latin, and his pony to ride on, and he and Robert are very well and strong, thank God.

Thank you for your words on spiritualism.  I have not yet seen the last ‘Cornhill.’  It pleases me that Thackeray has had the courage to maintain the facts before the public; I think much the better of him for doing so.  Owen’s book I shall try to get.  There is a weak reference to the subject in the ‘Saturday Review’ (against it), and I see an article advertised in ‘Once a Week,’ all proving that the public is awaking to a consideration of the class of phenomena. Investigation is all I desire.  The ‘Spiritual Magazine’ lingers so this month that I fear, and Robert hopes, something may have happened to it.

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On returning to Rome for the winter, which they did about September, the Brownings found quarters at 126 Via Felice.  The following letter was written shortly after the death of Mrs. Browning’s sister.

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To Miss E.F.  Haworth

[Rome:  autumn 1860.]

In one word, my dearest Fanny, I will thank you for what is said and not said, for sympathy true and tender each way.  It is a great privilege to be able to talk and cry; but I cannot, you know.  I have suffered very much, and feel tired and beaten.  Now, it’s all being lived down; thrown behind or pushed before, as such things must be if we are to live:  not forgetting, not feeling any tie slackened, loving unchangeably, and believing how mere a line this is to overstep between the living and the dead.

Do you know, the first thing from without which did me the least good was a letter from America, from dear Mrs. Stowe.  Since we parted here in the spring, neither of us had written, and she had not the least idea of my being unhappy for any reason.  In fact, her thought was to congratulate me on public affairs (knowing how keenly I felt about them), but her letter dwelt at length upon spiritualism.  She had heard, she said, for the fifth time from her