and how we have retreated from the kind advances of the English society
here. Now people seem to understand that we are to be left alone. . . .'

Florence: April 1 ('50).

'. . . We drive day by day through the lovely Cascine, just sweeping
through the city. Just such a window where Bianca Capello looked out
to see the Duke go by--and just such a door where Tasso stood and where
Dante drew his chair out to sit. Strange to have all that old world life
about us, and the blue sky so bright. . . .'

Venice: June 4 (probably '50).

'. . . I have been between Heaven and Earth since our arrival at Venice.
The Heaven of it is ineffable--never had I touched the skirts of so
celestial a place. The beauty of the architecture, the silver trails of
water up between all that gorgeous colour and carving, the enchanting
silence, the music, the gondolas--I mix it all up together and maintain
that nothing is like it, nothing equal to it, not a second Venice in the
world.

'Do you know when I came first I felt as if I never could go away. But
now comes the earth-side.

'Robert, after sharing the ecstasy, grows uncomfortable and nervous,
unable to eat or sleep, and poor Wilson still worse, in a miserable
condition of sickness and headache. Alas for these mortal Venices, so
exquisite and so bilious. Therefore I am constrained away from my joys
by sympathy, and am forced to be glad that we are going away on Friday.
For myself, it did not affect me at all. Take the mild, soft, relaxing
climate--even the scirocco does not touch me. And the baby grows
gloriously fatter in spite of everything. . . . As for Venice, you can't
get even a "Times", much less an "Athenaeum". We comfort ourselves by
taking a box at the opera (a whole box on the grand tier, mind) for
two shillings and eightpence, English. Also, every evening at half-past
eight, Robert and I are sitting under the moon in the great piazza of
St. Mark, taking excellent coffee and reading the French papers.'

If it were possible to draw more largely on Mrs. Browning's
correspondence for this year, it would certainly supply the record of
her intimacy, and that of her husband, with Margaret Fuller Ossoli. A
warm attachment sprang up between them during that lady's residence in
Florence. Its last evenings were all spent at their house; and, soon
after she had bidden them farewell, she availed herself of a two days'
delay in the departure of the ship to return from Leghorn and