your pen, like the benign spirit you are, and let me (who am credulous) believe that you care for us and think kindly of us in the midst of your brilliant London gossipry, and that you don’t disdain the talk of us, dark ultramontanists as we are.  You are good to us in so many ways, that it’s a reason for being good in another way besides.  At least, to reason so is one of the foolishnesses of my gratitude.

On the whole, I am satisfied with regard to ‘Colombe.’  I never expected a theatrical success, properly and vulgarly so called; and the play has taken rank, to judge by the various criticisms, in the right way, as a true poet’s work:  the defects of the acting drama seemed recognised as the qualities of the poem.  It was impossible all that subtle tracery of thought and feeling should be painted out clear red and ochre with a house-painter’s brush, and lose nothing of its effect.[22] A play that runs nowadays has generally four legs to run with—­something of the beast to keep it going.  The human biped with the ‘os divinior’ is slower than a racehorse even.  What I hope is, that the poetical appreciation of ‘Colombe’ will give an impulse to the sale of the poems, which will be more acceptable to us than the other kind of success....

Yes, dearest Mr. Kenyon, we mean, if we can, to go to Rome in the autumn.  It is very wrong of you not to come too, and the reasons you give against it are by no means conclusive.  My opinion is that, whatever the term of your natural life may be, you would probably have an additional ten years fastened on to it by coming to the Continent, and so I tease you and tease you, as is natural to such an opinion.  People twirl now in their arm-chairs, and the vitality in them kindles as they rush along.  Remember how pleased you were when you were at Como!  Don’t draw a chalk circle round you and fancy you can’t move.  Even tables and chairs have taken to move lately, and hats spin round without a giddy head in them.  Is this a time to stand still, even in the garden at Wimbledon?  ‘I speak to a wise man; judge what I say.’

We tried the table experiment in this room a few days since, by-the-bye, and failed; but we were impatient, and Robert was playing Mephistopheles, as Mr. Lytton said, and there was little chance of success under the circumstances.  It has been done several times in Florence, and the fact of the possibility seems to have passed among ‘attested facts.’  There was a placard on the wall yesterday about a pamphlet purporting to be an account of these and similar phenomena ‘scoperte a Livorno,’ referring to ‘oggetti semoventi’ and other wonders.  You can’t even look at a wall without a touch of the subject.  The circoli at Florence are as revolutionary as ever, only tilting over tables instead of States, alas!  From the Legation to the English chemist’s, people are ‘serving tables’ (in spite of the Apostle) everywhere.  When people gather round a table it isn’t to play whist.  So good, you say.  You can believe