In June, 1861, Mrs. Browning had an attack of bronchial trouble and on
the night of the twenty-ninth, alone in the room with her husband, she
died; and one writer says "none ever saw Browning upon earth again, but
only a splendid surface." Mrs. Browning was buried at Florence, the city
she had loved. Upon the wall of Casa Guidi, the building in which she
had lived, the citizens, grateful for her love and understanding of
them, placed a marble tablet in her memory.

The wonderful thing about Elizabeth Barrett Browning is that from her
weakness should have come poems of such strength. There was nothing
morbid in the words which came from her hushed, darkened sick room.
Indeed, her spirit was never tamed, and she herself confessed that one
of her faults was "head-longness;" that she snatched parcels open
instead of untying the string, and tore letters instead of cutting them.
In Browning's poems, which contain numerous beautiful allusions to her,
there is nothing more beautiful and more descriptive than the lines--

"O lyric love, half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire."

DON QUIXOTE

_By_ CERVANTES

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Unlike many of his class, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the greatest of
the old Spanish writers, was born to a changeful and busy life. The year
1547 marked his birth, and during the sixty-nine years of his life he
was constantly in action.

He served as a soldier in the war against the Turks, and at the Battle
of Lepanto, where he lost the use of his left hand, and in other battles
in which he took part, he showed great bravery and won a reputation of
the highest kind. While returning in 1575 from Italy to Spain, he was
captured by Algerian pirates and was sold in Algiers as a slave.
Throughout his five years' captivity, he was constantly threatened with
torture, but at no time did his courage fail him. Finally his widowed
mother and his sister, helped by some of their friends, none of whom
were by any means wealthy, succeeded in getting together sufficient
money to ransom him, and immediately on his return to Spain he rejoined
his old regiment.

Cervantes had written verses before the beginning of his military
career, but had won no name for himself. By 1583, however, he seems to
have determined to devote the rest of his life to literature, and in
that year he again began writing verses. For a number of years he earned
his livelihood by writing for the stage