eir home, though they made many excursions and
spent seasons elsewhere. Mrs. Browning grew so much better that a friend
said to her, "You are not _improved_, you are _transformed_;" and while
she was never strong and was often very ill, she never again sank back
to the state in which she had been before her marriage. The happiness
which shows in her letters is wonderful. "As for me," she writes, "when
I am so good as to let myself be carried upstairs, and so angelical as
to sit still on the sofa, and so considerate, moreover, as _not_ to put
my foot into a puddle, why _my_ duty is considered done to a perfection,
which is worthy of all adoration." And again, "If I could open my heart
to you in all seriousness, you would see nothing there but a sort of
enduring wonder of happiness."

Mrs. Browning, like her husband, loved Italy, and especially Florence,
and many of her poems, notably the _Casa Guidi Windows_, deal with
Italian subjects. Of the poems published after her marriage, however,
none are more exquisite than the series of _Sonnets from the
Portuguese_. These sonnets, which are not translations, and to which the
name _From the Portuguese_ was given simply as a blind, describe her
uncertainty and her joy in the love which was hers.

In 1849 another joy came to her. On March 9th of that year a son, Robert
Wiedeman Barrett Browning was born, and from that time on her letters,
quite like the letters of any unliterary mother, are full of the
wonderful doings of this child. Not that her interest in things literary
flagged in the least; she read everything which the libraries of Italy
afforded, or which her friends could send to her--novels, for which she
confessed to a great liking; poems, political pamphlets, newspapers, all
that came to her hand. Her longest and greatest poem, _Aurora Leigh_,
was written during her Italian years. While the story of the poem is in
no sense autobiographical, the heroine is in her beliefs and her ideals
Mrs. Browning's self, and this was the poem by which she felt herself
most willing to be judged.

Broken by several trips to England and by excursions to the most
beautiful parts of Italy, the years slipped by in uneventful happiness.
Many friends visited the Brownings, and all came away wondering and
delighted at the perfect family life they had been allowed to witness.
Frail always, Mrs. Browning was spoken of by acquaintances in her later
years as seeming "scarce embodied at all."