Bagni di Lucca: October 5, [1853].

My dearest Mrs. Martin, I am delighted to have your letter at last, and
should have come upon you like a storm in a day or two if you hadn't
written, for really I began to be low in patience. Also, after having
spent the summer here, we were about to turn our faces to Florence
again, and it was necessary to my own satisfaction to let you know of
our plans for the winter. To begin with those, then, we go to Florence,
as I said, from hence, and after a week or two, or three or four as it
may be, the briefer time if we let our house, we proceed to Rome for
some months. You see we _must_ visit Rome before we go northwards, and
northwards we _must_ go in the spring, so that the logic of events seems
to secure Rome to us this time; otherwise I should still doubt of our
going there, so often have we been on the verge and caught back....

So you think that he[26] is looking 'less young than formerly,' and that
'we should all learn to hear and make such remarks with equanimity.'
Now, once for all, let me tell you--confess to you--I never, if I live
to be a hundred, should learn that learning. Death has the luminous side
when we know how to look; but the rust of time, the touch of age, is
hideous and revolting to me, and I never see it, by even a line's
breadth, in the face of any I love, without pain and recoil of nature. I
have a worse than womanly weakness about that class of subjects. Death
is a face-to-face intimacy; age, a thickening of the mortal mask between
souls. So I hate it; put it far from me. Why talk of age, when it's just
an appearance, an accident, when we are all young in soul and heart? We
don't say, one to another, 'You are freckled in the forehead to-day,' or
'There's a yellow shade in your complexion.' Leave those disagreeable
trifles. I, for my part, never felt younger. Did _you_, I wonder? To be
sure not. Also, I have a gift in my eyes, I think, for scarcely ever
does it strike me that anybody is altered, except my child, for
instance, who certainly is larger than when he was born. When I went to
England after five years' absence, everybody (save one) appeared to me
younger than I was used to conceive of them, and of course I took for
granted that I appeared to them in the same light. Be sure that it is
highly moral to be young as long as possible. Women who throw up the
game early (or even late) and wear dresses 'suitable to their years'
(that is, as hideous as possible