edded friends; days of cloudless weather, following a spell of rain,
went by in "reading and writing and talking of all things in heaven and
earth, and a little besides; and sometimes even laughing as if we had
twenty people to laugh with us, or rather _hadn't_." Their sole
acquaintance was an Italian Professor of the University; for three
months they never looked at a newspaper; then a loophole on the world
was opened each evening by the arrival of the Siecle. The lizards were
silent friends of one poet, and golden oranges gleamed over the walls to
the unaccustomed eyes of the other like sunshine gathered into globes.
They wandered through pine-woods and drove until the purple mountains
seemed not far off. At the Lanfranchi Palace they thought of Byron, to
see a curl of whose hair or a glove from whose hand, Browning declares
(so foolish was he and ignorant) he would have gone farther than to see
all Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey condensed in Rosicrucian fashion
into a vial. In the Campo Santo they listened to a musical mass for the
dead. In the Duomo they heard the Friar preach. And early in the morning
their dreams were scattered by the harmonious clangour of the church
bells. "I never was happy before in my life," wrote Mrs Browning. Her
husband relieved her of all housekeeping anxieties. At two o'clock came
a light dinner--perhaps thrushes and chianti--from the _trattoria_; at
six appeared coffee and milk-rolls; at nine, when the pine-fire blazed,
roast chestnuts and grapes. Debts there were none to vex the spirits of
these prudent children of genius. If a poet could not pay his butcher's
and his baker's bills, Browning's sympathies were all with the baker and
the butcher. "He would not sleep," wrote his wife, "if an unpaid bill
dragged itself by any chance into another week "; and elsewhere: "Being
descended from the blood of all the Puritans, and educated by the
strictest of dissenters, he has a sort of horror about the dreadful fact
of owing five shillings five days." Perhaps some of this horror arose
from the sense of that weight which pecuniary cares hang upon all the
more joyous mountings of the mind. One grief and only one was still
present; Mr Barrett remained inexorable; his daughter hoped that with
time and patience his arms would open to her again. It was a hope never
to be fulfilled. In the cordial comradeship of Browning's sister,
Sarianna, a new correspondent, there was a measure of compensation.