'. . . Yes, Florence will never be _my_ Florence again. To build over or beside Poggio seems barbarous and inexcusable. The Fiesole side don't matter. Are they going to pull the old walls down, or any part of them, I want to know? Why can't they keep the old city as a nucleus and build round and round it, as many rings of houses as they please,--framing the picture as deeply as they please? Is Casa Guidi to be turned into any Public Office? I should think that its natural destination. If I am at liberty to flee away one day, it will not be to Florence, I dare say. As old Philipson said to me once of Jerusalem--"No, I don't want to go there,--I can see it in my head." . . . Well, goodbye, dearest Isa. I have been for a few minutes--nay, a good many,--so really with you in Florence that it would be no wonder if you heard my steps up the lane to your house. . . .' Part of a letter written in the September of '65 from Ste.-Marie may be interesting as referring to the legend of Pornic included in 'Dramatis Personae'. '. . . I suppose my "poem" which you say brings me and Pornic together in your mind, is the one about the poor girl--if so, "fancy" (as I hear you say) they have pulled down the church since I arrived last month--there are only the shell-like, roofless walls left, for a few weeks more; it was very old--built on a natural base of rock--small enough, to be sure--so they build a smart new one behind it, and down goes this; just as if they could not have pitched down their brick and stucco farther away, and left the old place for the fishermen--so here--the church is even more picturesque--and certain old Norman ornaments, capitals of pillars and the like, which we left erect in the doorway, are at this moment in a heap of rubbish by the road-side. The people here are good, stupid and dirty, without a touch of the sense of picturesqueness in their clodpolls. . . .' The little record continues through 1866. Feb. 19, '66. '. . . I go out a great deal; but have enjoyed nothing so much as a dinner last week with Tennyson, who, with his wife and one son, is staying in town for a few weeks,--and she is just what she was and always will be--very sweet and dear: he seems to me better than ever. I met him at a large party on Saturday--also Carlyle, whom I never met at a "drum" before. . . . Pen is drawing our owl--a bird that is the light of our house, for his tameness and engaging ways. . . .' May 19, '66.