Paris, 102 Rue de Grenelle, Faubourg St. Germain:
November 5, [1855].

My dear Mr. Ruskin,--I thank you from my heart for your more than
interesting letter. You have helped me to see that dear friend of ours,
as without you I could not have seen her, in those last affecting days
of illness, by the window not only of the house in Berkshire, but of the
house of the body and of the material world--an open window through
which the light shone, thank God. It would be a comfort to me now if I
had had the privilege of giving her a very very little of the great
pleasure you certainly gave her (for I know how she enjoyed your
visit--she wrote and told me), but I must be satisfied with the thought
left to me, that now _she_ regrets nothing, not even great pleasures.

I agree with you in much if not in everything you have written of her.
It was a great, warm, outflowing heart, and the head was worthy of the
heart. People have observed that she resembled Coleridge in her granite
forehead--something, too, in the lower part of the face--however unlike
Coleridge in mental characteristics, in his tendency to abstract
speculation, or indeed his ideality. There might have been, as you
suggest, a somewhat different development elsewhere than in
Berkshire--not very different, though--souls don't grow out of the
ground.

I agree quite with you that she was stronger and wider in her
conversation and letters than in her books. Oh, I have said so a hundred
times. The heat of human sympathy seemed to bring out her powerful
vitality, rustling all over with laces and flowers. She seemed to think
and speak stronger holding a hand--not that she required help or
borrowed a word, but that the human magnetism acted on her nature, as it
does upon men born to speak. Perhaps if she had been a man with a man's
opportunities, she would have spoken rather than written a reputation.
Who can say? She hated the act of composition. Did you hear that from
her ever?

Her letters were always admirable, but I do most deeply regret that what
made one of their greatest charms unfits them for the public--I mean
their personal details. Mr. Harness sends to me for letters, and when I
bring them up, and with the greatest pain force myself to examine them
(all those letters she wrote to me in her warm goodness and
affectionateness), I find with wonder and sorrow how only a half-page
here and there _could_ be submitted to general readers--_could_, with
any decency, much less delicacy.

But no, her 'judgment' was not 'unerring.' She was too intensely
sympathetical not to err often, and in fact it was singular (or seemed
so) what faces struck her as most beautiful, and what books as most
excellent. If she loved a person, it was enough. She made mistakes one
couldn't help smiling at, till one grew serious to adore her for it. And
yet when she read a book, provided it wasn't written by a friend, edited
by a friend, lent by a friend, or associated with a friend, her judgment
could be fine and discriminating on most subjects, especially upon
subjects connected with life and society and manners. Shall I confess?
She never taught _me_ anything but a very limited admiration of Miss
Austen, whose people struck me as wanting souls, even more than is
necessary for men and women of the world. The novels are perfect as far
as they go--that's certain. Only they don't go far, I think. It may be
my fault.

You lay down your finger and stop me, and exclaim that it's my way
perhaps to attribute a leaning of the judgment through personal sympathy
to people in general--that I do it perhaps to _you_. No, indeed. I can
quite easily believe that you don't either think or say 'the pleasantest
things to your friends;' in fact, I am sure you don't. You would say
them as soon to your enemies--perhaps sooner. Also, when you began to
say pleasant things to me, you hadn't a bit of personal feeling to make
a happy prejudice of, and really I can't flatter myself that you have
now. What I meant was that you, John Ruskin, not being a critic _sal
merum_ as the ancients had it, but half critic, and half poet, may be
rather encumbered sometimes by the burning imagination in you, may be
apt sometimes, when you turn the light of your countenance on a thing,
to see the thing lighted up as a matter of course, just as we, when we
carried torches into the Vatican, were not perfectly clear how much we
brought to that wonderful Demosthenes, folding the marble round him in
its thousand folds--how much we brought, and how much we received. Was
it the sculptor or was it the torch-bearer who produced that effect? And
like doubts I have had of you, I confess, and not only when you have
spoken kindly of _me_. You don't mistake by your heart, through loving,
but you exaggerate by your imagination, through glorifying. There's my
thought at least.

But what I meant by 'apprehending too intensely,' dear Mr. Ruskin, don't
ask me. Really I have forgotten. I suppose I did mean something, though
it was a day of chaos and packing boxes--try to think I did therefore,
and let it pass.

You please me--oh, so much--by the words about my husband. When you
wrote to praise my poems, of course I had to bear it--I couldn't turn
round and say, 'Well, and why don't you praise him, who is worth twenty
of me? Praise my second Me, as well as my Me proper, if you please.'
One's forced to be rather decent and modest for one's husband as well as
for one's self, even if it's harder. I couldn't pull at your coat to
read 'Pippa Passes,' for instance. I can't now.

But you have put him on the shelf, so we have both taken courage to send
you his new volumes, 'Men and Women,' not that you may say 'pleasant
things' of them or think yourself bound to say anything indeed, but that
you may accept them as a sign of the esteem and admiration of both of
us. I consider them on the whole an advance upon his former poems, and
am ready to die at the stake for my faith in these last, even though the
discerning public should set it down afterwards as only a 'Heretic's
Tragedy.'

Our friend Mr. Jarves came to read a part of your letter to us,
confirmatory of doctrines he had heard from us on an earlier day. The
idea of your writing the art criticisms of the 'Leader' (!) was so
stupendously ludicrous, there was no need of faith in your loyalty to
laugh the whole imputation, at first hearing, to uttermost scorn. I must
say, in justice to Mr. Jarves, that he never did really believe one word
of it, though a good deal ruffled and pained that it should have been
believed by anybody. He is full of admiring and grateful feeling for
you, and has gone on to Italy in that mind.

As for me, I almost yearn to go too. We have fallen into a pit here in
Paris, upon evil days and rooms, an impulsive friend having taken an
apartment for us facing the east, insufficiently protected, and with a
bedroom wanting, so that we are still waiting, with trunks unpacked, and
our child sleeping on the floor, till we can get emancipated anyhow.
Then, through the last week's cold, I have not been well--only it will
not, I think, be much, as I am better already, and there will be no
practical end to the talk of Nice and Pau, which my husband had begun a
little. All this has hindered me from following my first impulse of
thanking you for your letter immediately.

How beautiful Paris is, and how I agree with you, as we both did with
dear Miss Mitford, on the subject of Louis Napoleon. I approve of him
_exactly because_ I am a democrat, and not at all for an exceptional
reason. I hold that the most democratical government in Europe is out
and out the French Government (which doesn't exclude the absolutist
element, far from it); but who in England understands this? and that the
representative man of France, the incarnate republic, is the man Louis
Napoleon? An extraordinary man he is. I never was a Buonapartist, though
the legend of the First Napoleon has wrung tears from me before now, and
I was very sorry when Louis Napoleon was elected instead of Cavaignac.
At the _coup d'etat_ I was not sorry. And since then I have believed in
him more and more.

So far in sympathy. In regard to the slaves, no, no, no; I belong to a
family of West Indian slaveholders, and if I believed in curses, I
should be afraid. I can at least thank God that I am not an American.
How you look serenely at slavery, I cannot understand, and I distrust
your power to explain. Do you indeed?

Dear Mr. Ruskin, do let us hear from you sometimes. It is such a great
gift, a letter of yours. Then remember that I am a spirit in prison all
the winter, not able to stir out. Up to this time we have lived _perdus_
from all our acquaintances because of our misfortunes. With my husband's
cordial regards, I remain most truly yours always,

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

The publishers are directed to send you the volumes on their
publication.