Yes, we are doing a little work, both of us.  Robert is working at a volume of lyrics, of which I have seen but a few, and those seemed to me as fine as anything he has done.  We neither of us show our work to one another till it is finished.  An artist must, I fancy, either find or make a solitude to work in, if it is to be good work at all.  This for the consolation of bachelors!

I am glad you like Mr. Powers’s paper.  You would have ‘fretted’ me terribly if you had not, for I liked it myself, knowing it to be an earnest opinion and expressive of the man.  I had a very interesting letter from him the other day.  He is devout in his art, and the simplest of men otherwise....

Now, I will ask you to write to us.  It is you who give us up, indeed.  Will your sister accept our true regards and sympathies?  I shall persist in hoping to see her a little stronger next spring—­or summer, rather.  May God bless you!  I will set myself down, and Robert with me, as

Faithfully and affectionately yours,
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

* * * * *

To Miss Mitford

Casa Tolomei, Alia Villa, Bagni di Lucca: 
August 20 and 21, 1853.

...  We are enjoying the mountains here, riding the donkeys in the footsteps of the sheep, and eating strawberries and milk by basins full.  The strawberries succeed one another, generation after generation, throughout the summer, through growing on different aspects of the hills.  If a tree is felled in the forests strawberries spring up just as mushrooms might, and the peasants sell them for just nothing.  Our little Penini is wild with happiness; he asks in his prayers that God would ‘mate him dood and tate him on a dontey,’ (make him good and take him on a donkey), so resuming all aspiration for spiritual and worldly prosperity.  Then our friends, Mr. and Mrs. Story, help the mountains to please us a good deal.  He is the son of Judge Story, the biographer of his father, and, for himself, sculptor and poet; and she a sympathetic, graceful woman, fresh and innocent in face and thought.  We go backwards and forwards to tea and talk at one another’s houses.  Last night they were our visitors, and your name came in among the Household Gods to make us as agreeable as might be.  We were considering your expectations about Mr. Hawthorne.  ‘All right,’ says Mr. Story, ’except the rare half hours’ (of eloquence).  He represents Mr. Hawthorne as not silent only by shyness, but by nature and inaptitude.  He is a man, it seems, who talks wholly and exclusively with the pen, and who does not open out socially with his most intimate friends any more than with strangers.  It isn’t his way to converse.  That has been a characteristic of some men of genius before him, you know, but you will be nevertheless disappointed, very surely.  Also, Mr. Story does not imagine that you will get anything from him on the subject