I have not been out yet, and am languid in spirits, I gather myself up by fits and starts, and then fall back.  Do you know, I think with positive terror sometimes, less of the journey than of having to speak and look at people.  If it were possible to persuade Robert, I should send him with Pen; but he wouldn’t go alone, and he must go this year.  Oh, I daresay I shall feel more up to the friction of things when once I have been out; it’s stupid to give way.  Also my sister Arabel talks of meeting me in France, though I might have managed that difficulty, but that Robert should see his father is absolutely necessary.  Meanwhile we don’t talk of it, and by May or June I shall be feeling another woman probably....

So you are going to work hard in Germany:  that is well.  Only beware of the English periodicals.  There’s a rage for new periodicals, and because the ‘Cornhill’ answers, other speculations crowd the market, overcrowd it:  there will be failures presently.

I have written a long letter when I meant to write a short one.  May God keep you, and love you, and make you happy!  Your ever affectionate

BA.

I am anxious about America, fearing a compromise in the North.  All other dangers are comparatively null.

* * * * *

To Miss E.F.  Haworth

126 Via Felice, Rome:  Saturday, [about January 1861].

Ah, dearest Fanny, I can’t rest without telling you that I am sorry at your receiving such an impression from my letter.  May God save me from such a sin as arrogance!  I have not generally a temptation to it, through knowing too well what I am myself.  At the same time, I do not dispute my belief in what you have so often confessed, that you don’t hold your attainments and opinions sufficiently ’irrespectively of persons.’  Believing which of you, I said, ‘under what new influence?’ and if I said anything with too much vivacity, forgive me with that sweetness of nature which is at least as characteristic of you as the intellectual impressionability.  Really I would not wound you for the world—­but I myself perhaps may have been over-excitable, irritable just then, who knows? and, in fact, I was considerably vexed at the moment that, from anything said by me, you would infer what was so injurious and unjust to a woman like Mrs. Stowe.  I named her in this relation because she struck me as a remarkable example of the compatibility of freedom of thought with reverence of sentiment.  You generally get one or the other; the one excluding the other.  I never considered her a deep thinker, but singularly large and unshackled, considering the associations of her life, she certainly is.  When I hinted at her stepping beyond Swedenborg in certain of her ideas, I referred to her belief that the process called ‘regeneration,’ may commence in certain cases beyond the grave, and in her leaning to universal salvation views, which you don’t get at through Swedenborg.