is salvation to him with his irritable nerves, saves him from ruminating bitter cud, and from the process which I call beating his dear head against the wall till it is bruised, simply because he sees a fly there, magnified by his own two eyes almost indefinitely into some Saurian monster.  He has an enormous superfluity of vital energy, and if it isn’t employed, it strikes its fangs into him.  He gets out of spirits as he was at Havre.  Nobody understands exactly why—­except me who am in the inside of him and hear him breathe.  For the peculiarity of our relation is, that even when he’s displeased with me, he thinks aloud with me and can’t stop himself.  And I know ultimately that whatever takes him out of a certain circle (where habits of introvision and analysis of fly-legs are morbidly exercised), is life and joy to him.  I wanted his poems done this winter very much—­and here was a bright room with three windows consecrated to use.  But he had a room all last summer, and did nothing.  Then, he worked himself out by riding for three or four hours together—­there has been little poetry done since last winter, when he did much.  He was not inclined to write this winter.  The modelling combines body-work and soul-work, and the more tired he has been, and the more his back ached, poor fellow, the more he has exulted and been happy—­’no, nothing ever made him so happy before’—­also the better he has looked and the stouter grown.  So I couldn’t be much in opposition against the sculpture—­I couldn’t, in fact, at all.  He has the material for a volume, and will work at it this summer, he says.  His power is much in advance of ‘Strafford,’ which is his poorest work of all.  Oh, the brain stratifies and matures creatively, even in the pauses of the pen.

At the same time his treatment in England affects him naturally—­and for my part I set it down as an infamy of that public—­no other word.  He says he has told you some things you had not heard, and which, I acknowledge, I always try to prevent him from repeating to anyone.  I wonder if he has told you besides (no, I fancy not) that an English lady of rank, an acquaintance of ours (observe that!), asked, the other day, the American Minister whether ‘Robert was not an American.’  The Minister answered ’Is it possible that you ask me this?  Why, there is not so poor a village in the United States where they would not tell you that Robert Browning was an Englishman, and that they were very sorry he was not an American.’  Very pretty of the American Minister—­was it not?—­and literally true besides.

I have been meditating, Sarianna, dear, whether we might not make our summer out at Fontainebleau in the picturesque part of the forest.  It would be quiet, and not very dear.  And we might dine together and take hands as at Havre—­for we will all insist on Robert’s doing the hospitality.  I confess to shrinking a good deal about the noise of Paris—­we might try Paris later.