It is evident, too, that her strength was already beginning to decline and the various family and public anxieties which followed 1856 made demands on what remained of it too great to allow of much application to poetry.
* * * * * _To Miss E.F.

Haworth_ [Bagni di Lucca:] Monday, September 28, [1857].
You will understand too well why I have waited some days before answering your letter, dearest Fanny, though you bade me write at once, when I tell you that my own precious Penini has been ill with gastric fever and is even now confined to his bed.

Eleven days ago, when he was looking like a live rose and in an exaggeration of spirits, he proposed to go with me, to run by my portantina in which I went to pay a visit some mile and a half away.

The portantini men walked too fast for him, and he was tired and heated.

Then, while I paid my visit, he played by the river with a child of the house, and returned with me in the dusk.
He complained of being tired during the return, and I took him up into my portantina for ten minutes.