Helen Hunt Jackson Papers, Part 2, Ms 0156, Box 2, Folder 23a, Anne Brewster to HHJ, 1869.
Transcribed by Gloria Helmuth, 2003, with corrections by Susan Dixon, 2009.

Envelope addressed:
Mrs. Helen Hunt,
Care of Munroe & Co.
7 Rue Scribe.
Paris
France
Postmarked: E. PONT. ST. MICH...[rest obliterated] 9 AOUT 69
Second postmark: [TROTA?] 6 AGO 69

in pencil: [July 5, 1860]
Thursday
25 July / 69
Villa Murte
Near Frascate

My dear, your charming letter to Mr. Lanciani enclosing the dear little billet to me with the pretty endearing terms you confer on me were all received thankfully. We held high council together and rejoiced that you had at last made a sign.

I am amused at your placing the reproach of silence on me. I told you my friend that whenever you wished to hear from me, to write and I would reply to you – I waited both patiently and impatiently. Mr. Lanciani wrote enclosing you the piece of Etruscan paper and came to me in his distress at your silence. He feared the precious paper he had sent over the unknown Sea of the Italian Post (reversing the Hero & Leander story) had disappeared & never reached you.

So, we waited and waited – I with the wisdom of age assured the youth that we were not forgotten and with prophecy gained from past experience – when I was also attractive, bright-eyed and at delicious thirty that the paper had doubtless reached you but that other Leanders were offering up other papers to the Shrine. If he bided his time he would find I was an honest old Sorceress and he did bide his time - the letter came and made the dear boy rub his hands with delight and say in baby like English “Oh so nice, so nice!” Can’t you hear him?

The charming agreeable eminently useful young man has gone on a journey to several places on the Adriatic side to Orinse & to Pesaro at the home of the Rossini fete 26 Aug. He is to write to me in English during his absence for he is studying English with me. We are reading that excessively cheerful & lively book Layard’s Nineveh, which however Lanciani likes extremely. He reads extremely well and when he returns in the autumn he is to write me as exercises little notes to my mythical young women.

Lancini is a most useful friend my dear Helen. I have made several interesting items in my letters from his delightful bits of information, and I shall never cease to be grateful to you & the lost key for his acquaintance.

I never left Rome until last Sunday and so far from being dead, I am growing stout and increasing in indolence. We talked of going up the Adriatic also a leisurely carriage journey to Venice & back.

But Mr. Read had his large life-size Sheridan to finish and several of his last winters commissions. He worked too hard all the spring and about two or three weeks ago he was seized with fever not the perniciosa but still an ugly fever, which placed him non du combat.

Just then I received a tempting invitation from that bewitching woman Mrs Terry backed by darling Minnola Crawford & Mr Terry to pay them an indefinite visit at their Villa at Siena to see the great Mogen Age Siennese 16 Aug. fete to go to Pesaro to the Rossini fete & visit the Etruscan cities later – Of course I had to say, Nay to the sweet Satan of selfishness.

This dear little lady Mrs Read could not be left alone of course. I shall not leaver her all summer. If she needed me in the winter when she had a friend at every corner how much more does she need me now when there is no one in Rome of our own country people!

We were in despair about Mr. Read. The Dr. said he must leave Rome. The sick man refused to go far. He must be near enough to go in to town when he was able to finish his work. So one morning last week we came with Mr. Grant to this Villa, decided on an apartment, hastened the packing and came out last Sunday bag & baggage for two months. I have rented one part, the Reads the other until the 1 October. This gives us a fine range of rooms, and the whole enchanting view of mountains, Campagna and Sea. The grounds are ravishing and take me back to the times just after Raphael when the present leading princely families of Rome were established the Barberinis & Panifilis &c.

This villa is quite palatial. The Cardinal of York lived in it and, the other Stuarts. In my salon which is a superb room with three clerestory windows besides the three tall ones opening on a balcony are old locked glazes cabinet filled with delicious Dresden & Japanese china. Six of them! In them are ravishing Chinese Monsters & vases, “Boar’s head” of Dresden. A bust of Cardinal York reigns over one of these cabinets. From the windows we look on Frascati on Tivoli, the Sabine Hills & Appenines & over the beautiful Campagna. My bed room is over in Mrs Read’s suite for we use the whole in common as I am their guest. I have a suite of three rooms for sleeping & dressing accommodations, and the last one opens on the second garden of the Villa. My range of windows and my terrace look over the vast Campagna to the glittering dancing Mediterranean on which we can count ships and sails. We saw a steamer this morning on the beautiful sea. Such sunrises, such sunsets, such delicious air. Such morning stillness. We brought two boxes of books and intended to study a great deal. But we do nothing but “moon.” To be sure an invalid in the house especially when the invalid is the master of the house upsets all regularity. We read to him, talk, amuse him in every conceivable way for he is now in the most troublesome state for a man – convalescence. But we enjoy ourselves.

It is a privilege to simply live & breathe here. I love to sit with folded hands and do nothing. There is a delicious spot in this upper garden called the Hermitage. It is made in the broad hedge that forms a green fortification to the high wall. In it are seats, a table covered with brilliant fuschias and geraniums and from it a view that is indescribably beautiful. – Below is a box wood garden, a little city with walls & turrets of box. Then large palm forms, pyramids with snakes running around them all chiselled out of box and back of it are Academia grove of [exes?] in which are marble seats placed at Olympian distances and a fountain.

Beyond in the Campagna and Sea for this Hermitage is not far from my garden’s door. Above us is a third garden with an artificial lake, little stone bridge and a wilderness of flowers. Large flights of stone steps with hatches ranged along lead is up and down into these gardens and below my bedroom windows is the grand or first terrace on which the state rooms and Chapel open. Below this again is the fine piazza of the Villa another beautiful garden of fountains and three long thick shaded avenues leading to the road. This is a poor sketch of a lovely scene.

Write to me very soon. I met a Mr Brown of the N.Y Sun in Rome this spring who knows your dear friend Mrs Calhoun, and knows of you. – He is a strange brusque but good man – and rejoices as much in his unbelief as if he had been born a Jew. I have so little to tell you. Good bye. I often think of you and love you dearly.

Truly your friend

Anne Brewster

I have taken an apartment for next winter
71 Della Croce 3d piano

ed a tempting invitation from that bewitching woman Mrs Terry backed by darling Minnola Crawford & Mr Terry to pay them an indefinite visit at their Villa at Siena to see the great Mogen Age Siennese 16 Aug. fete to go to Pesaro to the Rossini fete & visit the Etnanian cities later - Of course I had to say, Nay to the sweet Satan of selfishness.

This dear little lady Mrs Read could not be left alone of course. I shall not leaver her all summer. If she needed me in the winter when she had a friend at every corner how much more does she need me now when there is no one in Rome of our own country people!