distance), and that
she will be dear and sacred to me to the end of my own life.

Dearest Sarianna, I thank you for your consideration and admirable
self-control in writing those letters. I do thank and bless you.
If the news had come unbroken by such precaution to my poor darling
Robert, it would have nearly killed him, I think. As it is, he has
been able to cry from the first, and I am able to tell you that though
dreadfully affected, of course, for you know his passionate love for
her, he is better and calmer now--much better. He and I dwell on
the hope that you and your dear father will come to us at once.
Come--dear, dear Sarianna--I will at least love you as you
deserve--you and him--if I can do no more. If you would comfort
Robert, come.

No day has passed since our marriage that he has not fondly talked of
her. I know how deep in his dear heart her memory lies. God comfort
you, my dearest Sarianna. The blessing of blessed duties heroically
fulfilled _must_ be With you. May the blessing of the Blessed in
heaven be added to the rest!

Robert stops me. My dear love to your father.

Your ever attached sister, BA.

_To Miss Browning_
[April 1849.]

You will have comfort in hearing, my dearest Sarianna, that Robert
is better on the whole than when I wrote last, though still very much
depressed. I wish I could get him to go somewhere or do something--at
any rate God's comforts are falling like dew on all this affliction,
and must in time make it look a green memory to you both. Continually
he thinks of you and of his father--believe how continually and
tenderly he thinks of you. Dearest Sarianna, I feel so in the quick
of my heart how you must feel, that I scarcely have courage to entreat
you to go out and take the necessary air and exercise, and yet that
is a duty, clear as other duties, and to be discharged like others
by you, as fully, and with as little shrinking of the will. If your
health should suffer, what grief upon grief to those who grieve
already! And besides, we who have to live are not to lie down under
the burden. There will be time enough for lying down presently, very
soon; and in the meanwhile there is plenty of God's work to do with
the body and with the soul, and we have to do it as cheerfully as
we can. Dearest Sarianna, you can look behind and before, on blessed
memories and holy hopes--love is as full for you as ever in the old
relation, even though her life in the world is cut off. T