Do your American friends write ever to you about the rapping spirits?  I hear and would hear much of them.  It is said that at least fifteen thousand persons in America, of all classes and society, are mediums, as the term is.  Most curious these phenomena.

[The end of the letter is lost]

* * * * *

To Miss Mitford

Casa Guidi, Florence:  February [1853].

I had just heard of your accident from Arabel, my much loved friend, and was on the point of writing to you when your letter came.  To say that I was shocked and grieved to hear such news of you, is useless indeed; you will feel how I have felt about it.  May God bless and restore you, and make me very thankful, as certainly I must be in such a case....

The comfort to me in your letter is the apparent good spirits you write in, and the cheerful, active intentions you have of work for the delight of us all.  I clap my hands, and welcome the new volumes.  Dearest friend, I do wish I had heard about the French poetry in Paris, for there I could have got at books and answered some of your questions.  The truth is, I don’t know as much about French modern poetry as I ought to do in the way of metier.  The French essential poetry seems to me to flow out into prose works, into their school of romances, and to be least poetical when dyked up into rhythm.  Mdme. Valmore I never read, but she is esteemed highly, I think, for a certain naivete, and happy surprises in the thought and feeling, des mots charmants.  I wanted to get her books in Paris, and missed them somehow; there was so much to think of in Paris.  Alfred de Musset’s poems I read, collected in a single volume; it is the only edition I ever met with.  The French value him extremely for his music; and there is much in him otherwise to appreciate, I think; very beautiful things indeed.  He is best to my mind when he is most lyrical, and when he says things in a breath.  His elaborate poems are defective.  One or two Spanish ballads of his seem to me perfect, really.  He has great power in the introduction of familiar and conventional images without disturbing the ideal—­a good power for these days.  The worst is that the moral atmosphere is bad, and that, though I am not, as you know, the very least bit of a prude (not enough perhaps), some of his poems must be admitted to be most offensive.  Get St. Beuve’s poems, they have much beauty in them you will grant at once.  Then there is a Breton[17] poet whose name Robert and I have both of us been ungrateful enough to forget—­we have turned our brains over and over and can’t find the name anyhow—­and who, indeed, deserves to be remembered, who writes some fresh and charmingly simple idyllic poems, one called, I think, ‘Primel et Nola.’  By that clue you may hunt him out perhaps in the ‘Revue des Deux Mondes.’  There’s no strong imagination, understand—­nothing of that sort! but you have a sweet, fresh, cool sylvan feeling with him, rare among Frenchmen of his class.  Edgar Quinet has more positive genius.  He is a man of grand, extravagant conceptions.  Do you know the ‘Ahasuerus’?