Do you think I have no comfort in feeling them stroke me softly through the dark and distance?
May God love you, dearest Isa! Always your loving BA.
Robert's true love, and Pen's.
The weather is wonderfully warm.

In fact, the winter has been very mild--milder than usual for even Rome.
* * * * * _To Miss E.F.

Haworth_ 126 Via Felice, Rome: Tuesday, [about January 1861].
You really astonish me, dearest Fanny, so much by your letter, that I must reply to it at once.

I ask myself under what new influence (strictly clerical) is she now, that she should write so?
And has she forgotten me, never read 'Aurora Leigh,' never heard of me or from me that, before 'Spiritualism' came up in America, I have been called orthodox by infidels, and heterodox by church-people; and gone on predicting to such persons as came near enough to me in speculative liberty of opinion to justify my speaking, that the present churches were in course of dissolution, and would have to be followed by a reconstruction of Christian essential verity into other than these middle-age scholastic forms.

Believing in Christ's divinity, which is the life of Christianity, I believed this.