IV. JOANNA’S CARE 561

nor the Nith, nor the Wandel; but the two girls were surely a little cruel to call it “The Gutter”! Happiest times, for all of us, that ever were to be; not but that Joanie and her Arthur are giddy enough, both of them yet, with their five little ones, but they have been sorely anxious about me, and I have been sorrowful enough for myself, since ever I lost sight of that peach-blossom avenue. “Eden-land” Rosie calls it sometimes in her letters. Whether its tiny river were of the waters of Abana,¹ or Euphrates, or Thamesis, I know not, but they were sweeter to my thirst than the fountains of Trevi or Branda.

86. How things bind and blend themselves together! The last time I saw the Fountain of Trevi,² it was from Arthur’s father’s room-Joseph Severn’s, where we both took Joanie to see him in 1872, and the old man made a sweet drawing of his pretty daughter-in-law, now in her schoolroom; he himself then eager in finishing his last picture of the Marriage in Cana,³ which he had caused to take place under a vine trellis, and delighted himself by painting the crystal and ruby glittering of the changing rivulet of water out of the Greek vase, glowing into wine. Fonte Branda⁴ I last saw with Charles Norton,* under

* I must here say of Joanna and Charles Norton this much farther, that they were mostly of a mind in the advice they gave me about my books; and though Joan was, as it must have been already enough seen, a true-bred Jacobite, she curiously objected to my early Catholic opinions as roundly as either Norton or John P. Robinson.⁵ The three of them-

¹ [2 Kings v. 12.]

² [See Plate XIII.; above, p. 276.]

³ [Left among other works unfinished in Severn’s studio, at the time of his death in 1879. A visitor to the studio says of it that it “evinced a touch of genius in representing the transformed water poured from one pitcher at first transparent as crystal, but changing colour in its are, like a rainbow, and descending red into the other. Severn was proud of this idea; but it was characteristic of the man that when he had painted in the miracle, with a few sketchy figures in the background, he abandoned the design for a new memory portrait of Keats at the age of eighteen” (Professor E. S. Robertson, quoted in William Sharp’s Life and Letters of Joseph Severn, p. 303).]

⁴ [For other reference to this fountain of Siena, celebrated by Dante, see Vol. XVII. p. 551, Vol. XXIII. p. 29, and Vol. XXXII. p. 223.]

⁵ [Of Lowell’s Biglow Papers: “John P. Robinson he Sez they didn’t know everything’ down in Judee.”]

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