Don't expect Neapolitan Scenery at Pisa, quite in the North, remember.
Mrs. Shelley found Italy for the first time, real Italy, at Sorrento,
she says. Oh that book--does one wake or sleep? The 'Mary dear' with
the brown eyes, and Godwin's daughter and Shelley's wife, and who
surely was something better once upon a time--and to go through Rome
and Florence and the rest, after what I suppose to be Lady
Londonderry's fashion: the intrepidity of the commonplace quite
astounds me. And then that way, when she and the like of her are put
in a new place, with new flowers, new stones, faces, walls, all
new--of looking wisely up at the sun, clouds, evening star, or
mountain top and wisely saying 'who shall describe _that_ sight!'--Not
_you_, we very well see--but why don't you tell us that at Rome they
eat roasted chestnuts, and put the shells into their aprons, the women
do, and calmly empty the whole on the heads of the passengers in the
street below; and that at Padua when a man drives his waggon up to a
house and stops, all the mouse-coloured oxen that pull it from a beam
against their foreheads sit down in a heap and rest. But once she
travelled the country with Shelley on arm; now she plods it, Rogers in
hand--to such things and uses may we come at last! Her remarks on art,
once she lets go of Rio's skirts, are amazing--Fra Angelico, for
instance, only painted Martyrs, Virgins &c., she had no eyes for the
divine _bon-bourgeoisie_ of his pictures; the dear common folk of his
crowds, those who sit and listen (spectacle at nose and bent into a
comfortable heap to hear better) at the sermon of the Saint--and the
children, and women,--divinely pure they all are, but fresh from the
streets and market place--but she is wrong every where, that is, not
right, not seeing what is to see, speaking what one expects to hear--I
quarrel with her, for ever, I think.
I am much better, and mean to be well as you desire--shall correct the
verses you have seen, and make them do for the present.
Saturday, then! And one other time only, do you say?
God bless you, my own, best friend.