But among the advantages of our Florence--the art, the olives, the sunshine, the cypresses, and don't let me forget the Arno and mountains at sunset time--is that of an all but infallible post office.

One loses letters at Rome.

Here, I think, we have lost _one_ in the course of eight years, and for that loss I hold my correspondent to blame.
How good you are to me! How kind! The soul of a cynic, at its third stage of purification, might feel the value of 'Gold' laid on the binding of a book by the hand of John Ruskin.

Much more I, who am apt to get too near that ugly 'sty of Epicurus' sometimes! Indeed you have gratified me deeply.

There was 'once on a time,' as is said in the fairy tales, a word dropped by you in one of your books, which I picked up and wore for a crown.