How I like Mrs. Carlyle’s note! You will go of course. But it will not rain to-morrow, and you shall not have the advantage of coming through it to me, ... for this reason (among others far better), that I have engaged to see, at three or four perhaps, a friend of ours from the country. She is in London for only two days and wrote to beg me to see her, and to-day I escaped by half a rudeness, and, if I do to-morrow, it will be by a whole rudeness. So, not to-morrow! And, if Saturday should be taken from us, we must find three days somehow next week—it will be easily done.

As to Florence, the flood of English is the worst water of all in the argument. And then Dr. Chambers ‘warned me off’ Florence, as being too cold for the winter. It would be as well not to begin by being ill; and half I am afraid of Ravenna—though Ravenna may not be cold, and though Shelley may belie it altogether. ‘A miserable place’ he calls it in the ‘Letters.’ Still I observe that his first impressions are apt to be darker than remain. For instance, he began by hating Pisa, and preferred it to most places, afterwards. There is Pisa by the way! Or your Sorrento ... Salerno ... Amalfi ... you shall consider if you please—find a new place if you like.

It is my last letter perhaps till I see you. May God bless you, I lift up my heart to say. How happy I ought to be, ... and am, ... with your thoughts all round me, so, as you describe! Let them call me your very own

Ba.

R.B. to E.B.B.

Friday Morning.
[Post-mark, June 19, 1846.]

I shall hardly be able, I am afraid, to get your letter ... if one should come through your dear goodness, my own Ba ... before I go out ... having to meet the Procters’ party in Town: so I will just write my joy at its being little more now than twenty-four hours before I shall see you, I trust. The day is cool and nearer rain than I fancied probable—but, oh the task-work, Egyptian bondage, that much going-out would be to me, who am tired (unreasonably) beforehand on this first and most likely last occasion during the year. It is a pity that I am so ignorant about Hahn-Hahn’s books—one, ‘Faustina,’ I got last night, but have neither heart nor time to ‘get it up’ in a couple of hours.

Something you said on Mrs. Jameson’s authority amused me—the encomium on my grace in sitting still to see the play and not jumping on the stage to act too—as if it were not the best privilege one finds in being ‘known’ never so little, that it dispenses one from having to make oneself known. When you are shipwrecked among Caribbee Indians you are forced to begin professing ‘I can make baskets, and tell fortunes, and foresee eclipses—so don’t eat me!’ And even there if they threatened nothing of the kind, I should be content to live and die as unhonoured as one of their own cabbage-trees.

I must go now—the day gets hotter, but then our day draws nearer—All my heart is yours, best of dearest loves, my own Ba, as I am your own—