Since we came here I have had a letter from Ruskin, written in a very desponding state about his work, and life, and the world....

Life goes on heavily with me, but it goes on:  it has rolled into the ruts again and goes....

Write to me, my Isa, and love me.

I am your ever loving BA.

* * * * *

To Miss I. Blagden

[Rome:  November-December 1860.]

...  Now while I remember it let me tell you what I quite forgot yesterday.  If through Kate’s dealing with American papers you get to hear of a lyric of mine called ’De Profundis,’[95] you are to understand that it was written by me nearly twenty years ago, before I knew Robert; you will observe it is in my ‘early manner,’ as they say of painters.  It is a personal poem, of course, but was written even so, in comparatively a state of retrospect, catching a grief in the rebound a little. (You know I never can speak or cry, so it isn’t likely I should write verses.) The poem (written, however, when I was very low) lay unprinted all those years, till it turned up at Florence just when poor Mrs. Howard’s bereavement and Mr. Beecher’s funeral sermon in the ‘Independent’ suggested the thought of it—­on which, by an impulse, I enclosed it to the editor, who wanted more verses from me.  Now you see it comes out just when people will suppose the motive to be an actual occasion connected with myself.  Don’t let anyone think so, dear Isa.  In the first place, there would be great exaggeration; and in the second, it’s not my way to grind up my green griefs to make bread of.  But that poem exaggerates nothing—­represents a condition from which the writer had already partly emerged, after the greatest suffering; the only time in which I have known what absolute despair is.

Don’t notice this when you write.

Write.  Take the love of us three.  Yes, I love you, dearest Isa, and shall for ever.

BA.

* * * * *

To Mrs. Martin

126 Via Felice, Rome:  Friday, [about December 1860].

I have not had courage to write, my dearest friend, but you will not have been severe on me.  I have suffered very much—­from suspense as well as from certainty.  If I could open my heart to you it would please me that your sympathy should see all; but I can’t write, and I couldn’t speak of that.  It is well for those who in their griefs can speak and write.  I never could.

But to you after all it is not needful.  You understand and have understood.

My husband has been very good to me, and saved me all he could, so that I have had solitude and quiet, and time to get into the ruts of the world again where one has to wheel on till the road ends.  In this respect it has been an advantage being at Rome rather than Florence.  Now I can read, and have seen a few faces.  One must live; and the only way is to look away from oneself into the larger and higher circle of life in which the merely personal grief or joy forgets itself.