The acquaintance with Mr. Ruskin soon ripened into a warm friendship, which was the cause of much happiness to Miss Mitford during the last years of her life. His attentions to her when she was unwell were unremitting either in the way of interesting books to entertain her or of delicacies of the table to tempt her appetite. On one occasion when she was confined to her bed from the effects of a fall, he writes to her: “I do indeed sympathize most deeply in the sorrow (it may without exaggeration be so called) which your present privation must cause you, especially coming in the time of spring—your favourite season.... After all though your feet are in the stocks, you have the Silas spirit, and the doors will open in the mid-darkness.” After an important event in his life had occurred in 1848, he writes: “Two months ago I was each day on the point of writing to you to ask for your sympathy—the kindest and keenest sympathy that, I think, ever filled the breadth and depth of an unselfish heart.” And then alluding to the Revolution of 1848 he says: “I should be very happy just now but for these wild storm clouds bursting on my dear Italy and my fair France. My occupation gone and all my earthly treasures ... perished amidst ‘the tumult of the people and the imagining of vain things.’ ... I begin to feel that ... these are not times for watching clouds or dreaming over quiet waters, that some serious work is to be done, and that the time for endurance has come rather than for meditation, and for hope rather than for happiness. Happy those whose hope, without this severe and tearful rending away of all the props and stability of earthly enjoyments, has been fixed ‘where the wicked cease from troubling.’ Mine has not; it was based on ‘those pillars of the earth’ which are astonished at His reproof.”[20] [Footnote 20: See Cook’s _Life of Ruskin_.] Mary Mitford continued her intimate correspondence with Miss Barrett after the latter’s marriage with Robert Browning—which was a source of much happiness to both. She warmly admired Mrs. Barrett Browning’s poems, as we have already seen, but Browning’s poems were not equally intelligible or attractive to her, and in a letter to a friend she thus quaintly criticizes his style and writing: “I am just reading Robert Browning’s Poems,” she says, “there is much more in them than I thought to find.... He ought to be forced to write journey-work for his daily bread (say for the _Times_) which would make him write clearly.”