I hoped to have written to you again, I found it impossible to do so; so
here I am in the room at Bannisters where you and I and Emily were
sitting together a few weeks ago,--she on her knees, writing for a fly
to take me to the steamer to-night, and I writing to you from this
place, where it seems as if you were still sitting beside us. Emily
won't let me send you your little square ink-bottle for Queen's heads,
but says she will keep it for you, so there I leave it in her hands.
Charles Greville's book (for it is not a pamphlet) is called "The Policy
of England to Ireland," or something as nearly like that as possible. My
praise of it may occasion you some disappointment, for I am pleased with
it more because it is so much better than anything I expected from him
than because it is particularly powerful or striking in itself. The
subject interests me a good deal, and the book is very agreeably and
well written, and in a far better tone than I should have looked for in
anything of his.
I have besought Mr. Lowndes to forward my letters to me without any
delay, and I have no doubt he will do so....
As for death, well is it with those who quietly reach the fifth act of
their lives, with only the usual and inevitable decay and dropping off
of all beloved things which time must bring; the sudden catastrophe of
adverse circumstance, wrecking a whole existence in the very middle of
its course, is a more terrible thing than death.
My dearest Hal, I have no more to say but that "I love you." Emily is
talking to me, and I feel as if I ought to talk to her. Give my dear
love to dear Dorothy, and believe me
Ever yours,
FANNY.
ROME, TRINITA DEI MONTI, Monday, April 20th, 1846.
You ask me what I shall do in the spring, my dear Hal. My present plan
is to return to England next December, and remain with my father, if he
can have me with him without inconvenience, till the weather is fine
enough to admit of my returning without too much wretchedness to
America....
When E---- and my father wrote to me to return to England, I had no idea
but that I was to have a home with the latter, that he expected and
wished me to live with him.... I think now that if his deafness obliges
him to give up his public readings, and cuts him off from his club and
the society that he likes, he will not be sorry that I should remain
with him....
By-the-by, I take your question about my plans for the spring to refer
not to this but to next spring, as I suppose you know that I mean to
remain with my sister during the coming summer, and that we are going to
spend the greater part of it at Frascati, where E---- has taken a
charming apartment in a lovely villa belonging to the Borghese.
You will be in England next winter, dear Hal, and I shall come then and
stay with you and Dorothy. You have interfered so little with my
journal-keeping by your letters that I have been wondering and lamenting
that I did not hear from you for the last some time, and was all but
wrought up to the desperate pitch of writing to you _out of turn_, to
know what was the matter, when I received your last letter. I do not,
however, keep my journal with any sort of regularity; my time is
extremely and very irregularly occupied, and I should certainly preserve
no record whatever of my impressions but for the very disagreeable
conviction that it is my duty to do so, if there is, as I believe there
is, the slightest probability of my being able by this means to earn a
little money and to avoid drawing upon my father's resources. I have a
great contempt for this process, and a greater contempt for the barren
balderdash I write: but exchange is no robbery, a thing is worth what it
will fetch, and if a bookseller will buy my trash, I will sell it to
him; for beggars must, in no case, be choosers....
You say that I have yet told you nothing of my satisfaction in Rome. I
wish you had not made your challenge so large. How shall I tell you of
my satisfaction in Rome? and at which end of Rome, or my satisfaction,
shall I begin? You must remember, in the first place, that its
strangeness is not absolutely to me what it is to many English people;
the brilliant and enchanting sky is not unlike that with which I have
been familiar for some years past in America; the beautiful and (to us
Anglo-Saxon islanders) unusual vegetation bears some resemblance to that
of the Southern States in winter. Boston, you know, is in the same
latitude as Rome, and though the American northern winter is
incomparably more severe than that of Italy, the summer heat and the
southern semi-tropical vegetation are kindred features in that other
world and this. The difference of this winter climate and that of the
United States has hitherto been an unfavorable one to me; for I have
been extremely unwell ever since I have been here--the sirocco destroys
me body and soul while it lasts, and there is a sultry heaviness in the
atmosphere that gave me at first perpetual headaches, and still
continues to disagree extremely with me. Now, of these abatements of my
satisfaction I have told you, but of my satisfaction itself I should
find it impossible to tell, but I should think you might form some idea
of it, knowing both me and the place where I am.
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 Trinita 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, 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....
We are now at Frascati, and in spite of the inexhaustible, immortal
interest of Rome, I am rejoicing with my whole nature, moral, mental,
and physical, in our removal to the country. The beautiful aspect of
this enchanting region, occasionally, by rare accident, recalls the hill
country in America that I am so fond of; but this is of a far higher and
nobler order of beauty.
The Campagna itself is an ever-present feature of picturesque grandeur
in the landscape here, and gives it a character unlike anything anywhere
else.
The district of country round Lenox rejoices in a number of small lakes
(from one hill-side one sees five), of a few miles in circumference,
which, lying in the laps of the hills, with fine wooded slopes sweeping
down to their bright basins, give a peculiar charm to the scenery;
while here, as you know, the volcanic waters of Albano and Nemi lie so
deep in their rocky beds as to be invisible, unless from their very
margins.
Of the human picturesqueness of this place and people no American
scenery or population have an atom; and isolated, ugly, mean,
matter-of-fact farm-houses, or whitewashed, clap-boarded, stiff, staring
villages, alike without antiquity to make them venerable or
picturesqueness to make them tolerable, are all that there represent the
exquisitely grouped and colored masses of building, or solitary
specimens of noble time-tinted masonry and architecture, that every
half-fortress farmhouse in the plain, or hamlet or convent on the
hill-side, present in this paradise of painters.
I must confess to you, however, that the _populousness_ of this
landscape is not agreeable to me. Absolute loneliness and the absence of
every trace of human existence was such a striking feature of the
American scenery that I am fond of, where it was possible in some
directions to ride several miles without meeting man or woman or seeing
their dwellings, that the impossibility of getting out of sight of human
presence or human habitation is sometimes irksome to me here.
It is true that this scenery is often wildly sublime in its character;
nevertheless, it is overlooked in almost every direction by villas,
monasteries, or villages, and if one escapes from these (as, indeed, I
only suppose I _may_, for I have not yet been able to do so), one
stumbles among the ruins and gigantic remains of the great race that has
departed, and recollections of men, their works and ways, pursue one
everywhere, and surround one with the vestiges of the humanity of bygone
centuries.
In the woods of Massachusetts wild-cats panthers, and bears are yet
occasionally to be met with, and the absence of the human element,
whether present or past, gives a character of unsympathizing savageness
to the scenery; while here it has so saturated the very soil with its
former existence that where there is nobody there are millions of
ghosts, and that, if the sense of solitude is almost precluded, there is
an abiding and depressing one of desolate desertion.
The personal danger which I am told attends walking alone about the
woods and hills here rather impairs my enjoyment of the lovely
country....
How lamentably foolish human beings are in their intercourse with each
other, to be sure, whether they love or hate, or whatever they do!...
The epistle of yours that I am now answering I received only this
morning, and, owing no one else a previous debt, sat down instantly to
discharge my debt to you. Am I honest? am I just? If I am not, show me
how I am not; if I am, why, hold your tongue.
The climate of Rome disagreed with me more than any climate of which I
have yet had experience. I had a perpetual consciousness of my bilious
tendencies, and when the sirocco blew I found it difficult to bear up
against that and the permanent causes of depression I always have to
struggle against. The air here is undoubtedly freer and purer, but even
here we do not escape from that deadly hot wind, that blast, that I
should think came straight from hell, it is so laden with despair.
I liked those pretty lasses, the Ladies T----, very much. All young
people interest me, and must be wonderfully displeasing if they do not
please me. I met them frequently, but they were naturally full of gayety
and life and spirits, which I naturally was not. The little society I
went into in Rome oppressed me dreadfully with its ponderous vapidity,
and beyond exchanging a few words with these bonnie girls, and admiring
their sweet pleasant faces, I had nothing to do with them. There was
much talk about the chances of a marriage between Lord W---- and Lady
M----, but though her father left no stone unturned to accomplish this
great blessing for his pretty daughter, the matter seemed extremely
doubtful when the season ended and they all went off to Naples.
As for Mrs. H----, if she had chronicled me, I am afraid it would
scarcely have been with good words. I met her at a party at Mrs.
Bunsen's (whose husband is the son of Arnold's friend).... The young
lady impressed me as one of that numerous class of persons who like to
look at a man or woman whose name, for any reason, has been in the
public mouth, and probably her curiosity was abundantly satisfied by my
being brought up and shown to her. She made no particular impression
upon me, but I have no doubt that in sorrow, or joy, or any real genuine
condition, instead of what is called society, she might perhaps have
interested me. It takes uncommon powers of fascination, or what is even
rarer, perfect simplicity, to attract attention or arouse sympathy in
the dead atmosphere of modern civilized social intercourse. All is so
drearily dry, smooth, narrow, and commonplace that the great deeps of
life below this stupid stagnant surface are never seen, heard, or
thought of.
If your nieces' constancy in following the round of monotonously
recurring amusements of a Dublin season amazes me, they would certainly
think it much more amazing to pass one's time as I do, wandering about
the country alone, dipping one's head and hands into every wayside
fountain one comes to, and sitting down by it only to get up again and
wander on to the next spring of living water. The symbol is comforting,
as well as the element itself, though it is a mere suggestion of the
spiritual wells by which one may find rest and refreshment, and pause
and ponder on this dusty life's way of ours.
I rejoice the distress in Ireland is less than was anticipated, and am
sorry that I cannot sympathize with your nephew's political views
[Colonel Taylor was all his life a consistent and fervent Tory]....
Politics appear to me, in a free government, to be the especial and
proper occupation of a wealthy landowner; and, in such a country as
Ireland, I am sure they might furnish a noble field for the exercise of
the finest intelligence and the most devoted patriotism, as well as fill
the time with occupation of infinite interest, both of business and
benevolence. I should like to be a man with such a work....
My sister's little girl is lovely; she runs about, but does not speak
yet. God bless you, my dear friend. Give my love to dear Dorothy. If I
can, I will come and see you both at Torquay this next winter. I hope to
be in England in November.
Ever yours,
FANNY.
FRASCATI, Wednesday, July 1st, 1846.
... You know of old that the slightest word of blame from you is worse
than hot sealing-wax on my skin to me, and that to my self-justifications
there is no end. My dear friend, are mental perplexity and despondency,
moral difficulty, spiritual apathy, and a general bitter internal
struggle with existence, less real trials, less positive troubles, than
the most afflicting circumstances generally so classed? I almost doubt
it. It may be more difficult to formulate that species of anguish in
words, and it may seem a less positive and substantial grief than some
others, but the plagues of the soul are _real_ tortures, and I set few
sufferings above them, few difficulties and few pains beyond those that
have their source not in the outward dispensation of events, but in the
inward conditions of our physical and moral constitutions.
Comparing one lot with another, does not rather the equality of the
general doom of trouble and sorrow, of difficulty and struggle, witness
the impartiality with which we are governed and our several fates
distributed to us? The self-assured and self-relying strength of my
constitution (I mean by that my character as well as the temperament
from which it results) knows nothing of the trials that beset
yours--doubt, distrust, despondency. I have health, mental and physical
activity, and a "mounting spirit" of indomitable enjoyment that
buoyantly protects me from sufferings under which others wince and
writhe; nevertheless, I have the sufferings proper to my individuality,
and I needs must suffer, if it were only that I may be said to _live_,
in the fit and proper sense of the term. Our lots are just; by God they
are appointed....
But in spite of abiding sorrow, I have often hours of vivid enjoyment,
enjoyment which has nothing to do with happiness, or peace, or hope;
momentary flashes, bright gleams of exquisite pleasure, of which the
capacity seems indestructible in my nature; and whatever bitterness may
lie at my heart's core, it still leaves about it a mobile surface of
sensibility, which reflects with a sort of ecstasy every ray of light
and every form of beauty.
You certainly do not enjoy as I do, and perhaps therefore you do not
suffer as acutely; but we err in nothing more than in our estimate of
each other's natures, and might more profitably spend the same amount of
consideration upon our own lot, and its capabilities of sorrow or of joy
for our own improvement.
Why is it that people do perpetually live below their own pitch? as you
very truly described their living. My return to civilized society makes
me ponder much upon the causes of the desperate frivolity and dismal
inanity which calls itself by that name, and in the midst of which we
live and move and have our being. If people did really enjoy and amuse
themselves, nothing could be better; because enjoyment and amusement
_are_ great goods, and deserve to be labored for _sufficiently_; but the
absence of amusement, of enjoyment, of life, of spirits, of vivacity, of
_vitality_, in the society of the present day, and its so-called
diversions, strikes me with astonishment and compassion. For my own
part, I hold a good laugh to be inestimable in pleasure and in profit;
good nonsense well talked only less admirable than good sense well
delivered; and a spirit of fun the next best thing to a serious spirit;
and moreover, thank God, they are quite compatible! I think the stupid
shallowness of society has some deep causes; one among which is, of
course, that by devoting all their energies and all their faculties and
all their time to mere amusement, as they have no right to do, people
fail of their aim, and are neither well amused nor well occupied, nor
well anything else. For if "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,"
what does the reverse do for him? This passion for cakes and sugar-candy
in adult, not to say advanced, life is rather lugubrious; and of course
it strikes me forcibly on my return from America, where the absence of a
wholesome spirit of recreation is one of the dreariest features of the
national existence....
Here the absolute necessity for mere amusement strikes me as a sort of
dry-rot in certain portions of the fabric of civilized society, and
tends to make it a sapless crumbling mass of appearances--the most
ostentatious appearance of all, that of pleasure, being perhaps the
hollowest and most unreal.
It takes, I believe, no meaner qualities than intelligence and goodness
to enable a person to be thoroughly, heartily, and satisfactorily
amused.
Unless you, my dear friend, deprecate our meeting to part again, I have
no intention whatever of leaving England without seeing you once more. I
cannot imagine doing such a thing, unless in compliance with your wish,
or submission to inevitable necessity. I hope to come down to Torquay,
to you and Dorothy, for a few days in the winter.
I am amused at your saying that you don't think any one would feel very
comfortable living with me, who had not a great love of truth. Catherine
Sedgwick once said it was impossible to tell a lie before me _with any
comfort_; and yet I have told my own lies, and certainly sinned, as did
not the worthy lady who, being charged with a falsehood, replied
unhesitatingly, "Of course, I know it was a lie; _I made it!_ I thought
it would do good." Another lady of my acquaintance, speaking of a person
we both knew, who was indifferent, to say the least of it, upon the
question of veracity, exclaimed, "Oh, but Mrs. C---- is really too bad,
for she will tell stories _when there isn't the least necessity for
it_."
A---- was a curious instance of the distortion of a very upright nature;
for she is undoubtedly a person of great natural truth and integrity,
and yet, under the influence of an unfortunate passion, her pre-eminent
virtue suffered total eclipse; and she must have condescended, proud and
sincere as she was, to much duplicity and much absolute falsehood. Poor
girl!
I think one great argument against wrong-doing of every sort is that it
almost invariably, sooner or later, leads to a sacrifice of truth in
some way or other; and for that reason a hearty love of truth is a great
preservative from sin in general.
Your letters, directed either to Rome or here, to the care of Edward
Sartoris, have reached me hitherto safely and punctually....
My sister particularly begs me to tell you that she rides ("a-horseback,
you cuckoo!") between twelve and sixteen miles almost every day. I
cannot clearly tell whether she has grown thinner or I have grown used
to her figure.
The heat is beginning to be very oppressive, and I wish I was in
England, for I hate hot weather. The whole range of the Sabine Hills, as
I see them from my window here, look baked and parched and misty, in the
glare beyond the tawny-colored Campagna. Every flower in the garden has
bloomed itself away; the trees loll their heads to the hot gusts of the
sirocco, mocking one with the enchanting beckoning gesture of a breeze,
while the air is in truth like a blast from an oven or the draught at
the mouth of a furnace.
I walk before breakfast, and steep myself in perspiration; and get into
the fountain in the garden afterwards, and steep myself in cold water;
and by dint of the double process, live in tolerable comfort the rest of
the day. And I have no right to complain, for this is temperate to the
summer climate of Philadelphia.
Mary and Martha Somerville are paying us a visit of a few days, and I
have spent the last two mornings in a vast, princely, empty marble
gallery here, teaching them to dance the cachuca; and I wish you could
have seen Mrs. Somerville watching our exercises. With her eyeglasses to
her eyes, the gentle gentlewoman sat silently contemplating our
evolutions, and as we brought them to a conclusion, and stood (_not_
like the Graces) puffing and panting round her, unwilling not to say
some kindly word of commendation of our effort, she meekly observed,
"It's very pretty, very graceful, very"--a pause--"ladylike." She spoke
without any malicious intention whatever, dear lady, but she surely left
out the _un_. Do you not think it is time I should begin to think of
growing old? or do your nieces do anything more juvenile than this, with
all their ball-going?
God bless you, my dear Harriet. Good-bye.
I am ever, as ever yours,
FANNY.
FRASCATI, Wednesday, September 2nd, 1846.
MY DEAREST HARRIET,