l'Arno, Florence. I must get that out before the day of judgment, if I can. I'm so glad of your sweet flatteries in this note received to-day.
Florence, 25th August (1874).
I have not been able to write to you, or any one lately, whom I don't want to tease, except Dr. Brown, whom I write to for counsel. My time is passed in a fierce steady struggle to save all I can every day, as a fireman from a smoldering ruin, of history or aspect. To-day, for instance, I've been just in time to ascertain the form of the cross of the Emperor, representing the power of the State in the greatest political fresco of old times—fourteenth century. By next year, it may be next month, it will have dropped from the wall with the vibration of the railway outside, and be touched up with new gilding for the mob.
I am keeping well, but am in a terrible spell (literally, "spell," enchanted maze, that I can't get out of) of work.
I was a little scandalized at the idea of your calling the book "word-painting." My dearest Susie, it is the chief provocation of my life to be called a "word-painter" instead of a thinker. I hope you haven't filled your book with descriptions. I thought it was the thoughts you were looking for?
"Posie" would be pretty. If you ask Joanie she will tell you perhaps too pretty for me, and I can't think a bit to-night, for instead of robins singing I hear only blaspheming gamesters on the other side of the narrow street.
Florence, 1st September (1874).
Don't be in despair about your book. I am sure it will be lovely. I'll see to it the moment I get home, but I've got into an entirely unexpected piece of business here, the interpretation of a large chapel 11 full of misunderstood, or not at all understood, frescoes; and I'm terribly afraid of breaking down, so much drawing has to be done at the same time. It has stranded botany and everything.
I was kept awake half of last night by drunken blackguards howling on the bridge of the Holy Trinity in the pure half-moonlight. This is the kind of discord I have to bear, corresponding to your uncongenial company. But, alas! Susie, you ought at ten years old to have more firmness, and to resolve that you won't be bored. I think I shall try to enforce it on you as a very solemn duty not to lie to people as the vulgar public do. If they bore you, say so, and they'll go away. That is the right state of things.
How am I to know that I don't bore you, when I come, when you're so civil to people you hate?
Pass of Bocchetta, 1st October (1874).
All that is lovely and wonderful in the Alps may be seen without the slightest danger, in general, and it is especially good for little girls of eleven who can't climb, to know this—all the best views of hills are at the bottom of them. I know one or two places indeed where there is a grand peeping over precipices, one or two where the mountain seclusion and strength are worth climbing to see. But all the entirely beautiful things I could show you, Susie; only for the very highest sublime of them sometimes asking you to endure half an hour of chaise à porteurs, but mostly from a post-chaise or smoothest of turnpike roads.
But, Susie, do you know, I'm greatly horrified at the penwipers of peacocks' feathers! I always use my left-hand coat-tail, indeed, and if only I were a peacock and a pet of yours, how you'd scold me!
Sun just coming out over sea (at Sestri), which is sighing in towards the window, within your drive, round before the door's breadth of it, 12 seen between two masses of acacia copse and two orange trees at the side of the inn courtyard.
Geneva, 19th October (1874).
How I have been neglecting you! Perhaps Joanie may have told you that just at my last gasp of hand-work, I had to write quite an unexpected number of letters. But poor Joanie will think herself neglected now, for I have been stopped among the Alps by a state of their glaciers entirely unexampled, and shall be a week after my "latest possible" day, in getting home. It is eleven years since I was here, and very sad to me to return, yet delightful with a moonlight paleness of the past, precious of its kind.
I shall be at home with Joan in ten days now, God willing. I have much to tell you, which will give you pleasure and pain; but I don't know how much it will be—to tell you—for a little while yet, so I don't begin.
Oxford, 26th October (1874).
Home at last with your lovely, most lovely, letter in my breast pocket.
I am so very grateful to you for not writing on black paper.
Oh, dear Susie, why should we ever wear black for the guests of God?
WHARFE IN FLOOD
Bolton Abbey,
24th January, 1875.
The black rain, much as I growled at it, has let me see Wharfe in flood; and I would have borne many days in prison to see that.
No one need go to the Alps to see wild water. Seldom unless in the Rhine or Rhone themselves at their rapids, have I seen anything much grander. An Alpine stream, besides, nearly always has its bed full of loose stones, and becomes a series of humps and dumps of water wherever it is shallow; while the Wharfe swept round its curves of shore like a black Damascus saber, coiled into eddies of steel. At the Strid, it had risen eight feet vertical since yesterday, sheeting the flat rocks with foam from side to side, while the treacherous mid-channel was filled with a succession of boiling domes of water, charged through and through with churning white, and rolling out into the broader stream, each like a vast sea wave bursting on a beach.
There is something in the soft and comparatively unbroken slopes of these Yorkshire shales which must give the water a peculiar sweeping power, for I have seen Tay and Tummel and Ness, and many a big stream besides, savage enough, but I don't remember anything so grim as this.
I came home to quiet tea and a black kitten called Sweep, who lapped half my cream jugful (and yet I had plenty) sitting on my shoulder,—and Life of Sir Walter Scott. I was reading his great Scottish history tour, when he was twenty-three, and got his materials for everything nearly, but especially for Waverley, though not used till long afterwards.
Do you recollect Gibbie Gellatly? I was thinking over that question of yours, "What did I think?"13 But, my dear Susie, you might as well ask Gibbie Gellatly what he thought. What does it matter what any of us think? We are but simpletons, the best of us, and I am a very inconsistent and wayward simpleton. I know how to roast eggs, in the ashes, perhaps—but for the next world! Why don't you ask your squirrel what he thinks too? The great point—the one for all of us—is, not to take false words in our mouths, and to crack our nuts innocently through winter and rough weather.
I shall post this to-morrow as I pass through Skipton or any post-worthy place on my way to Wakefield. Write to Warwick. Oh me, what places England had, when she was herself! Now, rail stations mostly. But I never can make out how Warwick Castle got built by that dull bit of river.
"FRONDES."
Wakefield, 25th January, 1875.
Here's our book in form at last, and it seems to me just a nice size, and on the whole very taking. I've put a touch or two more to the preface, and I'm sadly afraid there's a naughty note somewhere. I hope you won't find it, and that you will like the order the things are put in.
Such ill roads as we came over to-day, I never thought to see in England.
Castleton,
Spanish chapel in S. Maria Novella.
That is, within that distance of the window.—J. R.
Of the things that shall be, hereafter.—J. R.
