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To Mrs. Jameson

Via Bocca di Leone, Rome:  December 21, 1853.

My dearest Mona Nina,—­I have been longer than I thought to be in Rome without writing to you, especially when I have a letter of yours for which to thank you.  My fancy was to wait till I had seen Gerardine in her own home, and then to write to you, but I have called on her three times, and the three Fates have been at it each time to prevent my getting in.  Still, we have met here, and I would rather not wait any longer for whatever might be added to what I have seen and know already....

Ah, dearest friend! you have heard how our first step into Rome was a fall, not into a catacomb but a fresh grave[29], and how everything here has been slurred and blurred to us, and distorted from the grand antique associations.  I protest to you I doubt whether I shall get over it, and whether I ever shall feel that this is Rome.  The first day at the bed’s head of that convulsed and dying child; and the next two, three, four weeks in great anxiety about his little sister, who was all but given up by the physicians; the English nurse horribly ill of the same fever, and another case in this house.  It was not only sympathy.  I was selfishly and intensely frightened for my own treasures; I wished myself at the end of the world with Robert and Penini twenty times a day.  Rome has been very peculiarly unhealthy; and I heard a Monsignore observe the other morning that there would not be much truce to the fever till March came.  Still, I begin to take breath again and be reasonable.  Penini’s cheeks are red as apples, and if we avoid the sun, and the wind, and the damp, and, above all if God takes care of us, we shall do excellently. I, of course, am in a flourishing condition; walk out nearly every day and scarcely cough at all.  Which isn’t enough for me, you see.  Dear friend, we have not set foot in the Vatican.  Oh, barbarians!

But we have seen Mrs. Kemble, and I am as enchanted as I ought to be, and even, perhaps, a little more.  She has been very kind and gracious to me; she was to have spent an evening with us three days since, but something intervened.  I am much impressed by her as well as attracted to her.  What a voice, what eyes, what eyelids full of utterance!

Then we have had various visits from Mr. Thackeray and his daughters.  ‘She writes to me of Thackeray instead of Raffael, and she is at Rome’!  But she isn’t at Rome.  There’s the sadness of it.  We got to Gibson’s studio, which is close by, and saw his coloured Venus.  I don’t like her.  She has come out of her cloud of the ideal, and to my eyes is not too decent.  Then in the long and slender throat, in the turn of it, and the setting on of the head, you have rather a grisette than a goddess.  ’Tis over pretty and petite, the colour adding, of course, to this effect.  Crawford’s studio (the American