social festivities, and
Professor Ferrucci offered them all the hospitalities of the University
library. They had an apartment of four rooms, "matted and carpeted,"
coffee and rolls in the morning, dinner at the Trattoria, "thrushes and
chianti with a marvelous cheapness, no trouble, no cook, no kitchen; the
prophet Elijah, or the lilies of the field, took as little thought for
their dining," writes Mrs. Browning, "and it exactly suits us. At nine we
have our supper of roast chestnuts and grapes.... My head goes round
sometimes. I was never happy before in my life.... And when I am so good
as to let myself be carried up-stairs, and so angelical as to sit still on
the sofa, and so considerate as not to put my foot into a puddle, why, my
duty is considered done to a perfection worthy all adoration.... Mrs.
Jameson and Geraldine are staying in the hotel, and we manage to see them
every day; so good and true and affectionate she is, and so much we shall
miss her when she goes.... Our present residence we have taken for six
months, but we have dreams, and we discuss them like soothsayers over the
evening grapes and chestnuts."

That in London Mrs. Jameson, on her first call on Miss Barrett, should
have so winningly insisted on being admitted to her room as to be
successful, almost to Miss Barrett's own surprise, seems, when seen in
connection with the way in which Fate was to throw them together
afterward, in Italy, to have been one of those "foreordained" happenings
of life.

They heard a musical mass for the dead in the Campo Santo; they walked
under orange trees with golden fruit hanging above their heads; they took
drives to the foot of the mountains, and watched the reflections in the
little lake of Ascuno. Mrs. Browning, from her windows, could see the
cathedral summit glitter whitely, between the blue sky and its own yellow
marble walls. Beautiful and tender letters came to them both from Mr.
Kenyon, and they heard that Carlyle had said that he hoped more from
Robert Browning, for the people of England, than from any other living
English writer. All of these things entered into the very fiber of their
Pisan days. Pisa seemed to her a beautiful town,--it could not be less,
she felt, with Arno and its palaces, and it was to her full of repose, but
not desolate. Meantime, Mr. Browning was preparing for a new edition of
his collected poems.

Curiously, all the biographers of Robert Browning have recorded that it
was du