of thought and tongue seem very delectable. Tell me what you think of Mrs. Butler's poems, which assuredly (at least to my mind's assurance) have more poetry in them, properly so called, if less of suavity and grace. And tell me if you have been taken and charmed as I have been, by the prose romance of the 'Improvisitore' translated from the Danish of Andersen by Mary Hewitt, and call it prose-but the poetry of it is true and rare."

"As to Flush, I thank you for him; for being glad that he has not 'arrived at the age of gravity and baldness,' and I can assure you of the fact of his not being yet four years old, (the very prime of his life,) and of his having lost no zest for the pleasures of the world-such as eating sponge-cake and drinking coffee a la creme. He lies by me on the sofa, where I lie and write; he lies quite at ease between the velvet of my gown and the fur of my couvre-pied, and has no wicked dreams, I can answer for it, of a hare out of breath, or of a partridge shot through the whirring wing; if he sees a ghost at all, it is of a little mouse which he killed once by accident. He is as innocent as the first dog, when Eve patted him. I had a visit the other day from Mrs. Jameson, and was delighted with her, of course. She is one of those fervid admirers of your America, who constitute, in fact, the flower of our England. Harriet Martineau's mesmeric experience (and she, by the way, is another instance) is making a great noise and sensation here, and producing some vexation among her unbelieving friends. It was, however, worthy of herself, having, according to her own belief, received a great benefit from means not only questionable, but questioned, to come forward bravely and avouch the truth of it. Do you believe at all? I do, but it is in the highest degree repulsive to me as a subject, and suggestive of horror. It is making great way in England, and, as far as I can understand, is disputed more by the unlearned than by the learned. Let me hear from you—I am, most gratefully, your friend."

"Wakondah has appeared, and having written to you of the delay in his avatar, I write quickly to apprise you of its occurrence, assuring you, at the same time, that if I was obliged to you for your intended gift, my gratitude has increased with my knowledge of its value. The poem is a fragment indeed, and so fragmentary as to forbid all guessing at the full design and ultimate aspect of the whole; still there are two great goods obvious in it; one is, the Americanism of the subject, and the other, a force and energy, and occasional majesty of expression and cadence, which are not common qualifications of poems, whether American or European; I am much struck by such lines as these, for instance:

And I earnestly hope that Wakondah may attain his full 'bulk' as a worthy national poem, and be recognised as such on either side of the Atlantic. When American poets write, as they too often do, English poems, must not the sad reason be that they draw their inspiration from the English poets, rather than from the grand omnipresence of nature; must not both cause and result partake of a certain wrongness? I fear so. And all should be hope, and nothing fear, in America! You have room there for whole choruses of poets-Autochthones -singing out of the ground. You, with your Niagara for a Hippocrene, and your silent cities of the woods, too old for ruins, and your present liberties, and your aspirations filling the future."

"Before all this, I should have told you that I have heard from Mr. Tennyson, and that he uses, in speaking of the newspapers, these words: The criticism is, on the whole, friendly and genial, and I have every reason to be obliged to the writer.'

"I am sure you will sympathize with many English hearts in my dear friend Miss Mitford's distressing embarrassments, as the public prints bring to your knowledge; and I can scarcely be wrong in telling you that her appeal to the tenderness of her friends, and the gratitude of her readers, has been answered here with a liberality adequate to our expectations. She is admirable in domestic life, admirable in literature, and womankind may be doubly proud of her, and the fortune should be worthy of the merit.

"I will not write to you any more to-day, you will lose your patience with me for ever if I do."

These passages, for they are but passages from an ample correspondence, seem to us to partake of the best characteristics of the best style of letter-writing; graceful, various, compact of matter, friendly and familiar. They do as much to advance Miss Barrett personally in the esteem of the world, as her noble poems have done in its admiration. Her cordial liking for America, and her lofty hopes of its progress in literature, must be grateful to all

well wishers of that young giant of the west. As of double interest, we are permitted to present, in extensu, a copious letter from her domestic hearth in Italy, where she has resided since her marriage.

“Pisa-Collegio, Ferdinando.

6

"Now once for all, and I say once for all, not so much because my hope is desperate of being forgiven, as because, when forgiven, I really mean to leave off sinning-I stand before you in sackcloth, praying for absolution. Hope is not desperate altogether; for I do think that by the time you have considered the extenuating circumstances' of my being actually married, and of the very imaginable conditions and anxieties which are apt to precede such an event in every woman's life when she feels at all, and especially when, as in my marriage, the event involves other change-as from the long seclusion in one room, to liberty and Italy's sunshine in these two kinds'-when, for a resigned life, I take up a happy one, and reel under it with my head and heart, why you will understand it to be pardonable, I do think, that I should too have forgotten some obvious social duties, such as writing letters. even to such true and tried friends as yourself. Shall I tell you, I find in my writing case an unfinished note to you, began before I left England, which I did immediately on my marriage-a fragment of a note, begun to inform you briefly of the position in which I stood, and of the meaning of my extraordinary conduct' to you. Now, have not you called it extraordinary' twenty times? But the course of events was too strong and full for me, and I was carried off my feet before I could have strength to speak my speech audibly. So forgive, forgive me. I shall behave better you will find for the future, and more gratefully, and I begin some four months after the greatest event of my life, by telling you that I am well and happy, and meaning to get as strong in the body by the help of this divine climate as I am in the spirit—the spirits! so much has God granted me compensation. Do you not see already that it was not altogether the sight of the free sky which made me fail to you before. So forgive me for all, all at once, forgive for all. My husband's name will prove to you that I have not left my vocation to the rhyming art, in order to marry: on the contrary, we mean, both of us, to do a great deal of work, besides surprising the world by the spectacle of two poets coming together without quarrelling, wrangling, and calling names in lyrical measures. He is preparing a new edition of his collected poems, in which he pays peculiar attention to the objections made against certain obscurities. As for me, the last thing I did was to send to Mr. Lowell, who wrote to me a year ago on behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society, (Mrs. Chapman doing the same thing,) the poem which they asked for. My conscience has been restless about it ever since, (whenever I thought that way,) but neither head nor heart were at liberty sufficiently to

do anything. What I have sent at last, my belief is, will never be printed in America, or will, if it should be, bring the writer into a scrape of disfavor. But I did only write conscientiously, you know, in writing at all; and my 'Cry of the Children,' was not less written against my own country. Your Man in the Republic' should have had the article 'Slave.' And now let me thank you for the pretty minute copy of the last edition, which you had the goodness to send me. I was glad to receive it on every account, and not least as an evidence of the success of your work. My husband desires me to thank you on his own part, for gifts of this sort which you have sent to him, and which he did not know how to return his acknowledgements for until the present time, when he is able to do so, with your permission, as to my friend and his friend together. Talking of friends, Miss Fuller was too late for me; I have not seen the track of her footsteps, otherwise I should have gladly received a woman who had brought the sign of your friendship with her, apart from other merits. We live here in the most secluded manner, eschewing English visiters and reading Vasari, and dreaming dreams of seeing Venice in the summer. Until the middle of April, we are tied to this perch of Pisa, as the climate is recommended for the weakness of my chest, and the repose and calmness of the place are by no means unpleasant to those who, like ourselves, do not lack for distractions and amusements in order to be very happy. Afterwards we go anywhere but to England-we shall not leave Italy at present. If I get quite strong, I may cross the desert on a camel yet, and see Jerusalem. There's a dream for younothing is too high or too low for my dreams just now. In the meanwhile you rage at me for my impertinency as to business, and common sense. I do believe that I sent no answer to the proposition of printing a selection from my poems, and perhaps by this hour of the day, both booksellers and public have forgotten me perfectly. If they care a jot for the said proposition, let me know; for I should like to have a voice in the selection of the poems. As to the prose volume I can't do it here, I am afraid-perhaps nobody cares for that. Tell me what you are doing, writing, thinking, because I care for all three. Mr. Poe sent me his book, and I had grace enough to send him my thanks— though you would not think it of me!!! Ashes I cast upon my head for all my misdeeds-now do, do forgive me for all!-I have Flush with me here, and he adapts himself to the sunshine as to the shadow, and when he hears me laugh lightly, begins not to think it too strange. As to news, you will not expect news from me now-until the last few days, we had not for months even seen a newspaper, and human faces divine, are quite rococo' with me, as the French would say. Mrs. Jameson however travelled with us from Paris, and we all went together to do pilgrimage at Vaucluse, where the living water gushes up into the face of the everlasting rock, and there is no green thing except Petrarch's memory. Yes, there is the water itself—that is brightly green-and there are one or two little cypresses. Now she has gone on to

Rome, where Mrs. Butler and her sister are residing. Dickens is in Paris-Tennyson, when I heard of him last, was in Switzerland, and disappointed with the mountains.' I wonder how anybody can be disappointed with anything— with nature, I mean. She always seems to me (or generally) to leap up to the level of the heart. Miss Martineau is gone to Egypt it appears-all the world is abroad. And all England is freezing-such accounts we hear of the cold— and then the dreadful details from Ireland-oh, when I write against slavery, it is not as one free from the curse- the curse of Cromwell,' falls upon us also! 'Poor, poor Ireland.' But nations, like individuals must be perfected by suffering.' In time we shall slough off our leprosy of the pride of money and of rank, and be clean, and just, and righteous. Can you read a word I have written? Good pens are in civilized life, and this shadowy paper we glide through the foreign post office with.

"Now shall I hear from you? My address is, A Madame Browning, Poste Restante, Pisa, Italy. Only remember that we shall not be here after the middle of April-not at Pisa. A letter might be forwarded, to be sure. We understand from our dear friend Mr. Kenyon, that Dickens' Christmas story has had a great success-nineteen thousand copies in two days. It is criticised however by critical people. Since we came here we have been to the Lanfranchi Palace, Lord Byron's. The marks of his feet are painted, plastered and gilded out, and another Italian family has given it a name, no longer Lanfranchi. We could only pass where the poet had been in the garden, where the Guiccioli used to shake the golden ringlets. I brought away some orange leaves. My husband offers you his regards,—and believe of me, that I am not less your friend, as ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.