Robert bids me say that he wrote you a constrained half-dozen lines by Mr. Henry Greenough, who asked for a letter of introduction to you, while the asker was sitting in the room, and the form of 'dear Mrs. Jameson' couldn't well be escaped from. He loves you as well as ever, you are to understand, through every complication of forms, and you are to love him, and me, for I come in as a part of him, if you please. Did you get my thanks for the dear Petrarch pen (so steeped in double-distilled memories that it seems scarcely fit to be steeped in ink), and our appreciation as well as gratitude for the books—which, indeed, charm us more and more? Robert has been picking up pictures at a few pauls each, 'hole and corner' pictures which the 'dealers' had not found out; and the other day he covered himself with glory by discovering and seizing on (in a corn shop a mile from Florence) five pictures among heaps of trash; and one of the best judges in Florence (Mr. Kirkup) throws out such names for them as Cimabue, Ghirlandaio, Giottino, a crucifixion painted on a banner, Giottesque, if not Giotto, but unique, or nearly so, on account of the linen material, and a little Virgin by a Byzantine master. The curious thing is that two angel pictures, for which he had given a scudo last year, prove to have been each sawn off the sides of the Ghirlandaio, so called, representing the 'Eterno Padre' clothed in a mystical garment and encircled by a rainbow, the various tints of which, together with the scarlet tips of the flying seraphs' wings, are darted down into the smaller pictures and complete the evidence, line for line. It has been a grand altar-piece, cut to bits. Now come and see for yourself. We can't say decidedly yet whether it will be possible or impossible for us to go to England this year, but in any case you must come to see Gerardine and Italy, and we shall manage to catch you by the skirts then—so do come. Never mind the rumbling of political thunders, because, even if a storm breaks, you will slip under cover in these days easily, whether in France or Italy. I can't make out, for my part, how anybody can be afraid of such things.
Will you be among the likers or dislikers, I wonder sometimes, of Robert's new book? The faculty, you will recognise, in all cases; he can do anything he chooses. I have complained of the asceticism in the second part, but he said it was 'one side of the question.' Don't think that he has taken to the cilix—indeed he has not—but it is his way to see things as passionately as other people feel them....
Chapman & Hall offer us no copies, or you should have had one, of course. So Wordsworth is gone—a great light out of heaven.
May God bless you, my dear friend!
Love your affectionate and grateful, for so many
reasons,
BA.
The death of Wordsworth on April 23 left the Laureateship vacant, and though there was probably never any likelihood of Mrs. Browning's being invited to succeed him, it is worth noticing that her claims were advocated by so prominent a paper as the 'Athenaeum,' which not only urged that the appointment would be eminently suitable under a female sovereign, but even expressed its opinion that 'there is no living poet of either sex who can prefer a higher claim than Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning.' No doubt there would have been a certain appropriateness in the post of Laureate to a Queen being held by a poetess, but the claims of Tennyson to the primacy of English poetry were rightly regarded as paramount. The fact that in Robert Browning there was a poet of equal calibre with Tennyson, though of so different a type, seems to have occurred to no one.
To Miss Mitford
Florence: June 15, 1850.