Autograph letter signed : Lucca, to George Goodin Moulton-Barrett, [1853] October 7-8.

Telling George that they are leaving Lucca, now that winter is coming, but they have had a happy and productive summer: "Robert especially has done a great deal of work, & will have his volume [Men and Women] ready for the spring without failure he says. I have been more indolent--but my poem [Aurora Leigh] is growing heavy on my hands--& will be considerably longer than the 'Princess' when finished. I mean it to be beyond all question my best work--only intention does not always act itself out into evidence, you know"; writing that they will travel to Rome before going north to Paris: "Oh George--I wish I could drag you all over the Alps, & then I would give up my nationality with an excellent grace, really! We should have to go to England to see our books through the press of course--but after, no more of England for me--I should be content with our Italy here for all the purposes of life"; describing spiritualist experiments she tried in Lucca with the sculptor William Wetmore Story and his wife; passing on a comic story from Edward Bulwer Lytton about a moving table; arguing with George about spiritualism and the proofs for and against it ("You may as well deny that men saw a comet this summer or any other palpable experience of mankind"); commenting on what Alfred Tennyson and Frederick Tennyson think about the matter; discussing the work of the poet Alexander Smith; asking George to tell Arabella that Isa Blagden asks after her, and also that Miss Blagden is reading Swedenborg, whose work seems to have become very popular; discussing the possibility of war with Russia; criticizing Lord Aberdeen's policy of continuing negotiations with the czar; writing that the Italians want war, and that they place their faith in Louis Napoleon; begging George and the other siblings to take care, since cholera appears to have broken out in England again.