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A letter to Miss Blagden written January 19, '63, is so expressive of his continued attitude towards the questions involved that, in spite of its strong language, his family advise its publication. The name of the person referred to will alone be omitted.
There was not a breath of wind, not a rustle in the gray-green olive trees that shimmered silver in the sunlight. Little lizards, sunning themselves on warm flat stones, watched him with brilliant eyes, and darted away to safety as he moved. The shadows of the cypress trees barred the white path like rungs of a ladder. And Blagden, drinking deep of the beauty of it all, climbed upward.
We drove into town yesterday afternoon, with Miss Blagden, to call on Mr. Kirkup, an old Englishman who has resided a great many years in Florence. He is noted as an antiquarian, and has the reputation of being a necromancer, not undeservedly, as he is deeply interested in spirit-rappings, and holds converse, through a medium, with dead poets and emperors.
In April it was summer weather; the drives of former days in the Cascine and to Bellosguardo, where a warm-hearted friend, Miss Isa Blagden, occupied a villa, were resumed.
A fuller picture of these simple, peaceful, and poetic Pornic days comes to us through Miss Blagden, August 18: . . . This is a wild little place in Brittany, something like that village where we stayed last year. Close to the sea a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly lonely one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles. Our house is the Mayor's, large enough, clean and bare.
"Party at the Deanery," one guest notes: "tripe for dinner; don't like crocodile for breakfast." Thus freed, to begin with, from the trammels of habit and prejudice, there was little in the way of fish, flesh, or fowl which Frank Buckland did not sooner or later try, with various results. For instance, to quote from his diary: "March 9. Party of Huxley, Blagden, Rolfs.
In Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau there is nothing enigmatical. "It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself," so Browning wrote to Miss Blagden soon after the publication of the volume. Many persons, however, have supposed that in Fifine at the Fair a riddle rather than a poem was given to the world by the perversity of the writer.
Powers came frequently up the hill in the cool of the evening, and Miss Blagden also proved an excellent neighbor. Early in September the "spirits" appeared again in great force. Mrs. Hawthorne felt the repugnance of the true artist to this uncanny business, and his thorough detestation of the subject commends itself to every sensible reader.
We hear something of his own feeling concerning this in a letter of August '65, again from Ste.-Marie, and called forth by some gossip concerning him which Miss Blagden had connected with his then growing fame.
Sir Charles Blagden went into a room where the heat was 1 degree or 2 degrees above 260 degrees, and remained eight minutes in this situation, frequently walking about to all the different parts of the room, but standing still most of the time in the coolest spot, where the heat was above 240 degrees.
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