I have hitherto been more anxious to remain with my sister than to go and see even the sights of Rome. Now, however, that our departure for Frascati must take place in about a month, I get up at seven every morning, and go out before breakfast alone, and in this way I am contriving to do some of my traveller's duty.
I walked this morning to the Pantheon, and heard Mass there. On my return home, I went into the Church of the Trinità dei Monti, to hear the French nuns sing their prayers. This afternoon we have been to the Villa Albani, which is ridiculously full of rose-bushes, which are so ridiculously full of roses that, except in a scene in a pantomime, I never saw anything like it. We remained in the garden, and the day was like a warm English April day, in consequence of which we had the loveliest pageant of thick sullen rain and sudden brilliant flashes of sunlight chasing each other all over those exquisite Alban Hills, with our very un-English foreground of terraces, fountains, statues, vases, evergreen garden walls of laurel, myrtle, box, laurestinus, and ridiculous rose-bushes in ridiculous bloom. There never was a more enchanting combination of various beauty than the landscape we looked at and the place from which we looked at it. I brought away some roses and lemon-blossoms: the latter I enclose in this letter, that some of the sweetness I have been enjoying may salute your senses also, and recall these divine scenes to your memory still more vividly. We came home from the Villa Albani in the most tremendous pour of rain, and had hardly taken off our bonnets when the whole sky, from the pines on Monte Maris to the Dome of Santa Maria Maggiore, was bathed all over in beauty and splendor indescribable. If we had only been Claude Lorraine, what a sunset we should have painted!
We have a charming little terrace garden to our house here, in which my "retired leisure" takes perpetual delight....
God bless you, dear.
Ever yours,
Fanny.
FRASCATI. Frascati, Wednesday, May 20th, 1846.
My dear Hal,
One would suppose that writing was to the full as disagreeable to you as it is to me, yet you do not profess that it is so, but merely write that you have little to say, as you think, that will interest me. Now, this is, I think, a general fallacy, but I am sure it is an individual one: the sight of your handwriting, representing as it does to me your face, your voice, and, above all, your generous and constant affection, makes the mere superscription of your letters worth a joyful welcome from me; and for any dearth of matter on your part, it lies, I rather think, chiefly in the direction which least affects me, i.e. society gossip, or "news," as it is called (O Lord! such old news as it is), being for ever the same stuff with a mere imperceptible difference in the pattern on it, let it come from what quarter of the civilized globe it will; and which, as far as I have had occasion to observe latterly, forms the chief resource of "polite letter-writers."
Of matters that do interest me, you might surely have plenty to say—your own health and frame of mind; the books you read, and what you think of them; and whatever of special interest to yourself occurs, either at home or abroad. At Ardgillan, you know, I know every inch of your ground, and between the little turret room and the Dell it seems to me many letters might be filled; then the state of politics in England interests me intensely; and the condition of Ireland is surely a most fruitful theme for comment just now....