a happy wayfaring through France that must have been! The
travelling had to be slow, and with frequent interruptions, on account
of Mrs. Browning's health: yet she steadily improved, and was almost
from the start able to take more exercise, and to be longer in the open
air than had for long been her wont. They passed southward, and after
some novel experiences in _diligences_, reached Avignon, where they
rested for a couple of days. Thence a little expedition, a poetical
pilgrimage, was made to Vaucluse, sacred to the memory of Petrarch and
Laura. There, as Mrs. Macpherson has told us, at the very source of the
"chiare, fresche e dolce acque," Browning took his wife up in his arms,
and, carrying her across through the shallow curling waters, seated her
on a rock that rose throne-like in the middle of the stream. Thus,
indeed, did love and poetry take a new possession of the spot
immortalised by Petrarch's loving fancy.

Three weeks passed happily before Pisa, the Brownings' destination, was
reached. But even then the friends were unwilling to part, and Mrs.
Jameson and her niece remained in the deserted old city for a score of
days longer. So wonderful was the change wrought in Mrs. Browning by
happiness, and by all the enfranchisement her marriage meant for her,
that, as her friend wrote to Miss Mitford, "she is not merely improved
but transformed." In the new sunshine which had come into her life, she
blossomed like a flower-bud long delayed by gloom and chill. Her heart,
in truth, was like a lark when wafted skyward by the first spring-wind.

At last to her there had come something of that peace she had longed
for, and though, in the joy of her new life, her genius "like an Arab
bird slept floating in the wind," it was with that restful hush which
precedes the creative storm. There is something deeply pathetic in her
conscious joy. So little actual experience of life had been hers that in
many respects she was as a child: and she had all the child's yearning
for those unsullied hours that never come when once they are missed. But
it was not till love unfastened the inner chambers of her heart and
brain that she realised to the full, what she had often doubted, how
supreme a thing mere life is. It was in some such mood that she wrote
the lovely forty-second of the "Sonnets from the Portuguese," closing
thus--

"Let us stay
Rather on earth, Beloved,--where the unfit
Contrario