By the way, the weather there is said to be murderous through bitter winds, but it must soften as the season advances.

May God bless you! I am yours in truest love.
BA.
We had a very pleasant vettura journey, Robert will have told you.
* * * * * _To Miss Mitford_ Florence: June 6, 1854.
Yes, dearest friend, I had your few lines which Arabel sent to me.

I had them on the very day I had posted my letter to you, and I need not say how deeply it moved me that you should have thought of giving me that pleasure of Mr.Ruskin's kind word at the expense of what I knew to be so much pain to yourself....
We mean to stay at Florence a week or two longer and then go northward.
I love Florence, the place looks exquisitely beautiful in its garden-ground of vineyards and olive trees, sung round by the nightingales day and night, nay, sung _into_ by the nightingales, for as you walk along the streets in the evening the song trickles down into them till you stop to listen.

Such nights we have between starlight and firefly-light, and the nightingales singing! I would willingly stay here, if it were not that we are constrained by duty and love to go, and at some day not distant, I daresay we shall come back 'for good and all' as people say, seeing that if you take one thing with another, there is no place in the world like Florence, I am persuaded, for a place to live in.

Cheap, tranquil, cheerful, beautiful, within the limit of civilisation yet out of the crush of it.