p was not less
marvelous, nor less to be considered, than her genius as a poet. Indeed,
truly speaking, the one, in its ideal fullness and completeness,
comprehends the other.

The summer days among the beautiful hills, and by the green, rushing
river, were made aboundingly happy to the Brownings by the presence of
their friends, the Storys, who shared these vast solitudes. The Storys had
a villa perched on the top of the hill, just above the Brownings', the
terrace shaded with vines, and the great mountains towering all around
them, while a swift mountain brook swept by under an arched bridge, its
force turning picturesque mills far down the valley. Under the shadow of
the chestnut trees fringing its banks, Shelley had once pushed his boat.
"Of society," wrote Story to Lowell, "there is none we care to meet but
the Brownings, and with them we have constant and delightful intercourse,
interchanging long evenings, two or three times a week, and driving and
walking whenever we meet. They are so simple, unaffected, and sympathetic.
Both are busily engaged in writing, he on a volume of lyrics, and she on a
tale or novel in verse."

This "tale" must have been "Aurora Leigh." The wives of the poet and the
sculptor held hilarious intercourse while going back and forth between
each other's houses on donkey-back, with an enjoyment hardly eclipsed by
that of Penini himself, whose prayer that God would let him ride on
"dontey-back" was so aboundingly granted that the child might well believe
in the lavishness of divine mercies. Browning and Story walked beside and
obediently held the reins of their wives' steeds, that no mishap might
occur. How the picture of these Arcadian days, in those vast leafy
solitudes, peopled only by gods and muses, the attendant "elementals" of
these choice spirits, flashes out through more than the half century that
has passed since those days of their joyous intercourse. There was a night
when Story went alone to take tea with the Brownings, staying till nearly
midnight, and Browning accompanied him home in the mystic moonlight. Mrs.
Browning, who apparently shared her little son's predilections for the
donkey as a means of transportation, would go for a morning ride, Browning
walking beside her as slowly as possible, to keep pace with the donkey's
degree of speed.

Into this Arcady came, by some untraced dispensation of the gods, a French
master of recitations, who had taught Rachel, and had otherwi