ans to be tired of it. Ah, dearest Miss
Mitford, hearts feel differently, adjust themselves differently before
the prick of sorrow, and I confess I agree with Robert. There are
places stained with the blood of my heart for ever, and where I could
not bear to stand again. If duty called him to New Cross it would be
otherwise, but his sister is rather inclined to come to us, I think,
for a few weeks in the autumn perhaps. Only these are scarcely times
for plans concerning foreign travel. It is something to talk of. It
has been a great disappointment to me the not going to England this
year, but I could not run the risk of the bitter pain to him. May God
bless you from all pain! Love me and write to me, who am ever and ever
your affectionate E.B.B.

_To Mrs. Jameson_
Bagni di Lucca: August 11, 1849.

I thank you, dearest friend, for your most affectionate and welcome
letter would seem to come by instinct, and we have thanked you in our
thoughts long before this moment, when I begin at last to write some
of them. Do believe that to value your affection and to love you back
again are parts of our life, and that it must be always delightful to
us to read in your handwriting or to hear in your voice that we are
not exiled from your life. Give us such an assurance whenever you can.
Shall we not have it face to face at Florence, when the booksellers
let you go? And meantime there is the post; do write to us.... Did
you ever see this place, I wonder? The coolness, the charm of the
mountains, whose very heart you seem to hear beating in the rush of
the little river, the green silence of the chestnut forests, and the
seclusion which anyone may make for himself by keeping clear of
the valley-villages; all these things drew us. We took a delightful
apartment over the heads of the whole world in the highest house
of the Bagni Caldi, where only the donkeys and the _portantini_ can
penetrate, and where we sit at the open windows and hear nothing but
the cicale. Not a mosquito! think of that! The thermometer ranges
from sixty-eight to seventy-four, but the seventy-four has been a
rare excess: the nights, mornings, and evenings are exquisitely cool.
Robert and I go out and lose ourselves in the woods and mountains, and
sit by the waterfalls on the starry and moonlit nights, and neither
by night nor day have the fear of picnics before our eyes. We were
observing the other day that we never met anybody except a monk girt
with a rope, n