the
picturesque little town which dreams out upon the Adriatic. But though
so close to the sea, Ancona is in summer time almost insufferably hot.
Instead of finding it cooler than Florence, it was as though they had
leapt right into a cauldron. Alluding to it months later, Mrs. Browning
wrote to Horne, "The heat was just the fiercest fire of your
imagination, and I _seethe_ to think of it at this distance."

It was a memorable journey all the same. They went to Ravenna, and at
four o'clock one morning stood by Dante's tomb, moved deeply by the
pathetic inscription and by all the associations it evoked. All along
the coast from Ravenna to Loretto was new ground to both, and endlessly
fascinating; in the passing and repassing of the Apennines they had
'wonderful visions of beauty and glory.' At Ancona itself,
notwithstanding the heat, they spent a happy season. Here Browning wrote
one of the loveliest of his short poems, "The Guardian Angel," which had
its origin in Guercino's picture in the chapel at Fano. By the allusions
in the sixth and eighth stanzas it is clear that the poem was inscribed
to Alfred Domett, the poet's well-loved friend immortalised as "Waring."
Doubtless it was written for no other reason than the urgency of song,
for in it are the loving allusions to his wife, "_my_ angel with me
too," and "my love is here." Three times they went to the chapel, he
tells us in the seventh stanza, to drink in to their souls' content the
beauty of "dear Guercino's" picture. Browning has rarely uttered the
purely personal note of his inner life. It is this that affords a
peculiar value to "The Guardian Angel," over and above its technical
beauty. In the concluding lines of the stanzas I am about to quote he
gives the supreme expression to what was his deepest faith, his
profoundest song-motive.

"I would not look up thither past thy head
Because the door opes, like that child, I know,
For I should have thy gracious face instead,
Thou bird of God! And wilt thou bend me low
Like him, and lay, like his, my hands together,
And lift them up to pray, and gently tether
Me, as thy lamb there, with thy garment's spread?

* * * * *

"How soon all worldly wrong would be repaired!
I think how I should view the earth and skies
And sea, when once again my brow was bared
After thy healing, with such different