ce. The superb state
carriages conveyed princes and foreign ambassadors and great nobles.
From the Piazza San Giovanni to St. Peter's every house was illuminated,
and the populace cheered and waved until the very air vibrated with
sound and color. These were the days when the methods of government were
a visible spectacle, a drama, making the life in Rome a daily
illuminated missal.

The Storys, on their return to Italy, located themselves for a time in
Florence, where they met the Brownings, and that lifelong friendship
between the poet and the sculptor was initiated. In these happy
Florentine days Mr. Story worked in his studio while his wife read to
him the life of Keats, then just issued, written by Monckton Milnes,
later Lord Houghton. But the "flowing conditions" soon bore them onward
to Rome, where they settled themselves in the Via Porta Pinciana, and
met the Crawfords, who were domiciled in the Villa Negroni. In these
Roman days, too, appeared Mr. Cropsey, of poetic landscape fame, and
here, too, was Margaret Fuller. Mazzini was then a leading figure in the
Chamber of Deputies,--"the prophet not only of modern Italy, but of the
modern world." He found Italy "utilitarian and materialistic, permeated
by French ideas, and weakened by her reliance on French initiative. He
was filled with hope that Italy might not only achieve her own unity,
but might once more accomplish, as she had in the Rome of the Caesars and
the Rome of the Church, the unity of the Western world. 'On my side I
believe,' he says, 'that the great problem of the day was a religious
problem, to which all other questions were but secondary.'" He was
asserting that "we cannot relate ourselves to the Divine, but through
collective humanity. It is not by isolated duty (which indeed the
conditions of modern life render more and more impossible), nor by
contemplation of mere Power as displayed in the material world, that we
can develop our nature. It is rather by mingling with the universal
life, and by carrying on the evolution of the never-ending work."

The studios of Mr. Crawford in those days were in the Piazza delle
Terme, near the Baths of Diocletian. William Page, the painter, was
domiciled on the slope of the Quirinal where he painted a portrait of
Charlotte Cushman which Mrs. Browning described as "a miracle"; one of
Mrs. Crawford; the head of Mrs. Story, which he insisted upon presenting
to her husband; and a magnificent portrait of Browning