s, whose brilliant intellectual life
appealed to them both. After a brief sojourn in the French capital, they
went on to England, and they had rather an embarrassment of riches in the
number of houses proffered them, for Tennyson begged them to accept the
loan of his house and servants at Twickenham, and Joseph Arnould was
equally urgent that they should occupy his town house. But they took
lodgings, instead, locating in Devonshire Street, and London life proceeds
to swallow them up after its own absorbing fashion. They breakfast with
Rogers, and pass an evening with the Carlyles; Forster gives a
"magnificent dinner" for them; Mrs. Fanny Kemble calls, and sends them
tickets for her reading of "Hamlet"; and the Proctors, Mrs. Jameson, and
other friends abound. They go to New Cross, Hatcham, to visit Mr.
Browning's father and sister, where the little Penini "is taken into
adoration" by his grandfather. Mrs. Browning's sisters show her every
affection, and her brothers come; but her father, in reply to her own and
her husband's letter, simply sends back to her, with their seals unbroken,
all the letters she had written to him from Italy. "So there's the end,"
she says; "I cannot, of course, write again. God takes it all into His own
hands, and I wait." The warm affection of her sisters cheered her, Mrs.
Surtees Cook (Henrietta Barrett) coming up from Somersetshire for a week's
visit, and her sister Arabel being invited with her. It was during this
sojourn in London that Bayard Taylor, poet and critic, and afterward
American Minister Plenipotentiary to Germany, called upon the Brownings,
bringing a letter of introduction from Hillard.

The poet's wife impressed Taylor as almost a spirit figure, with her
pallor and slender grace, and the little Penini, "a blue-eyed,
golden-haired boy, babbling his little sentences in Italian," strayed in
like a sunbeam. While Taylor was with them, Mr. Kenyon called, and after
his departure Browning remarked to his guest: "There goes one of the most
splendid men living,--a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in his
hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to be known
all over the world as Kenyon the Magnificent."

The poets were overwhelmed with London hospitalities, and as Mrs. Browning
gave her maid, Wilson, leave of absence to visit her own family, the care
of little Pen fell upon her. He was in a state of "deplorable grief" for
his nurse, "and after all," laugh