Florence: December 29, 1856.
My dearest Mrs. Martin,—I am very, very sorry. I feel for you to the bottom of my heart. But she was a pure spirit, leaning out the way God had marked for her to go, and you had not associated this world too much with her, as if she could have been meant to stay long in it. Always you felt that she was about to go—did you not, dear friend?—and so that she does not stay cannot be an astonishment to you. The pain is the same; only it can't be the bitter, unnatural pain of certain separations. Her sweetness has gone to the sweet, her lovely nature to the lovely; no violence was done to her in carrying her home. May God enable you to dwell on this till you are satisfied—glad, and not sorry! That the spirits do not go far, and that they love us still, has grown to me surer and surer. And yet, how death shakes us!
Yes indeed. I, too, have been very, very sad. This Christmas has come to me like a cloud. I can scarcely fancy England without that bright face and sympathetic hand, that princely nature, in which you might put your trust more reasonably than in princes. These ten years back he has stood to me almost in my father's place; and now the place is empty—doubly. Since the birth of my child (seven years since) he has allowed us—rather, insisted on our accepting (for my husband was loth)—a hundred a year, and without it we should have often been in hard straits. His last act was to leave us eleven thousand pounds; and I do not doubt but that, if he had not known our preference of a simple mode of life and a freedom from worldly responsibilities (born artists as we both are), the bequest would have been greater still. As it is, we shall be relieved from pecuniary pressure, and your affectionateness will be glad to hear this, but I shall have more comfort from the consideration of it presently than I can at this instant, when the loss, the empty chair, the silent voice, the apparently suspended sympathy, must still keep painfully uppermost.
You will wonder at a paragraph from the 'Athenæum,' which Robert thought out of taste until he came to understand the motive of it—that there had been (two days previous to its appearance) a brutal attack on the will, to the effect that literary persons had been altogether overlooked in the dispositions of the testator, in consequence of his, being a disappointed literary pretender himself. Therefore we were brought forward, you see, together with Barry Cornwall and Dr. Southey, producing a wrong impression on the other side—only I can't blame the 'Athenæum' writer for it; nor can anyone, I think. The effect, however, to ourselves is most uncomfortable, as we are overwhelmed with 'congratulations' on all sides, just as if we had not lost a dear, tender, faithful friend and relative—just as if, in fact, some stranger had made us a bequest as a tribute to our poetry. People are so obtuse in this world—as Robert says, so 'dense'; as Lord Brougham says, so 'crass.'
Whatever may be your liking or disliking of 'Aurora Leigh,' you will like to hear that it's a great success, and in a way which I the least expected, for a fortnight after the day of publication it had to go to press for the second edition. The extravagances written to me about that book would make you laugh, if you were in a laughing mood; and the strange thing is that the press, the daily and weekly press, upon which I calculated for furious abuse, has been, for the most part, furious the other way. The 'Press' newspaper, the 'Post,' and the 'Tablet' are exceptions; but for the rest, the 'Athenæum' is the coldest in praising. It's a puzzle to me, altogether. I don't know upon what principle the public likes and dislikes poems. Any way, it is very satisfactory at the end of a laborious work (for much hard working and hard thinking have gone to it) to hear it thus recognised, however I must think, with some bitterness, that the beloved and sympathetic friend to whom it was dedicated scarcely lived to know what would have given him so much pleasure as this.
Dearest Mrs. Martin, mind you tell me the truth exactly. I should like much to have pleased you and Mr. Martin, but I like the truth best of all from you....
Dearest friends, keep kind thoughts of
Your affectionate