Her letters to Emma were peeps of splendour for the invalid: her way of life on board the yacht, and sketches of her host and hostess as lovers in wedlock on the other side of our perilous forties; sketches of the bays, the towns, the people-priests, dames, cavaliers, urchins, infants, shifting groups of supple southerners-flashed across the page like a web of silk, and were dashed off, redolent of herself, as lightly as the silvery spray of the blue waves she furrowed; telling, without allusions to the land behind her, that she had dipped in the wells of blissful oblivion.

Emma Dunstane, as is usual with those who receive exhilarating correspondence from makers of books, condemned the authoress in comparison, and now first saw that she had the gift of writing.

Only one cry: 'Italy, Eden of exiles!' betrayed the seeming of a moan.

She wrote of her poet and others immediately.

Thither had they fled; with adieu to England! How many have waved the adieu! And it is England nourishing, England protecting them, England clothing them in the honours they wear.