Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett, letter postmarked 30 April 1845: 'That book you like so, the Danish novel, must be full of truth & beauty, to judge from the few extracts I have seen in Reviews. That a Dane should write so, confirms me in an old belief -- that Italy is stuff for the use of the North, and no more: pure Poetry there is none, nearly as possible none, in Dante even [...] strange that those great wide black eyes should stare nothing out of the earth that lies before them!'