"Oh, my own baby on my knees,
My leaping, dimpled treasure,

* * * * *

But God gives patience, Love learns strength,
And Faith remembers promise;

* * * * *

Still mine! maternal rights serene
Not given to another!
The crystal bars shine faint between
The souls of child and mother."

To this day, that little grave in the English cemetery in Florence, with
its "A. A. E. C." is sought out by the visitor. To Mrs. Browning the love
for her own child taught her the love of all mothers. In "Only a Curl" are
the lines:

"O children! I never lost one,--
But my arm's round my own little son,
And Love knows the secret of Grief."

Florence "bristled with cannon" that winter, but nothing decisive
occurred. The faith of the Italian people in Pio Nono, however, grew less.
Mr. Kirkup, the antiquarian, still carried on his controversy with Bezzi
as to which of them were the more entitled to the glory of discovering the
Dante portrait, and in the spring there occurred the long-deferred
marriage of Mrs. Browning's sister Henrietta to Captain Surtees Cook, the
attitude of Mr. Barrett being precisely the same as on the marriage of his
daughter Elizabeth to Robert Browning. The death of Wordsworth was another
of the events of this spring, leaving vacant the Laureateship. The
_Athenaeum_ at once advocated the appointment of Mrs. Browning, as one
"eminently suitable under a female sovereign." Other literary authorities
coincided with this view, it seeming a sort of poetic justice that a woman
poet should be Laureate to a Queen. The _Athenaeum_ asserted that "there is
no living poet of either sex who can prefer a higher claim than Elizabeth
Barrett Browning," but the honor was finally conferred upon Tennyson, with
the ardent approbation of the Brownings, who felt that his claim was
rightly paramount.

In the early summer the Marchese and Marchesa d'Ossoli, with their child,
sailed on that ill-starred voyage whose tragic ending startled the
literary world of that day. Their last evening in Florence was passed with
the Brownings. The Marchesa expressed a fear of the voyage that, after its
fatal termination, was recalled by her friends as being almost prophetic.
Curiously she gave a little Bible to the infant son of the poets as a
presentation from her own little child; and Robert Barrett Browning still
treasures, as a strange relic,