nxious to remain with my sister than to go
and see even the sights of Rome. Now, however, that our departure for
Frascati must take place in about a month, I get up at seven every
morning, and go out before breakfast alone, and in this way I am
contriving to do some of my traveller's duty.

I walked this morning to the Pantheon, and heard Mass there. On my
return home, I went into the Church of the Trinita dei Monti, to hear
the French nuns sing their prayers. This afternoon we have been to the
Villa Albani, which is ridiculously full of rose-bushes, which are so
ridiculously full of roses that, except in a scene in a pantomime, I
never saw anything like it. We remained in the garden, and the day was
like a warm English April day, in consequence of which we had the
loveliest pageant of thick sullen rain and sudden brilliant flashes of
sunlight chasing each other all over those exquisite Alban Hills, with
our very _un_-English foreground of terraces, fountains, statues, vases,
evergreen garden walls of laurel, myrtle, box, laurestinus, and
ridiculous rose-bushes in ridiculous bloom. There never was a more
enchanting combination of various beauty than the landscape we looked at
and the place from which we looked at it. I brought away some roses and
lemon-blossoms: the latter I enclose in this letter, that some of the
sweetness I have been enjoying may salute your senses also, and recall
these divine scenes to your memory still more vividly. We came home from
the Villa Albani in the most tremendous pour of rain, and had hardly
taken off our bonnets when the whole sky, from the pines on Monte Maris
to the Dome of Santa Maria Maggiore, was bathed all over in beauty and
splendor indescribable. If we had only been Claude Lorraine, what a
sunset we should have painted!

We have a charming little terrace garden to our house here, in which my
"retired leisure" takes perpetual delight....

God bless you, dear.

Ever yours,
FANNY.

FRASCATI, Wednesday, May 20th, 1846.
MY DEAR HAL,

One would suppose that writing was to the full as disagreeable to you as
it is to me, yet you do not profess that it is so, but merely write that
you have little to say, as you think, that will interest me. Now, this
is, I think, a general fallacy, but I am sure it is an individual one:
the sight of your handwriting