[The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II by Elizabeth Barrett Browning]@TWC D-Link bookThe Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II CHAPTER VIII 246/268
We shall be as exemplary as ever by next winter, you will see. Meanwhile, dearest Mrs.Martin, that _you_ should ask me about 'Armageddon' is most assuredly a sign of the times.
You know I pass for being particularly mad myself, and everybody, almost universally, is rather mad, as may be testified by the various letters I have to read about 'visible spirit-hands,' pianos playing themselves, and flesh-and-blood human beings floating about rooms in company with tables and lamps.
Dante has pulled down his own picture from the wall of a friend of ours in Florence five times, signifying his pleasure that it should be destroyed at once as unauthentic (our friend burnt it directly, which will encourage me to pull down mine by [_word lost_]). Savonarola also has said one or two things, and there are gossiping guardian angels, of whom I need not speak.
Let me say, though, that nothing has surprised me quite so much as _your_ inquiring about Armageddon, because I am used to think of you as the least in the world of a theorist, and am half afraid of you sometimes, and range the chairs before my speculative dark corners, that you may not think or see 'how very wild that Ba is getting!' Well, now it shall be my turn to be sensible and unbelieving.
There's a forced similitude certainly, in the etymology, between the two words; but if it were full and perfect I should be no nearer thinking that the battle of Armageddon could ever signify anything but a great spiritual strife.
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