reponderating a little
too much over an energetic intellect--called on them at the Baths of
Lucca, but the acquaintance did not ripen into friendship. And little
Miss Boyle, one of the family of the Earls of Cork, would come at night,
at the hour of chestnuts and mulled wine, to sparkle as vivaciously as
the pine-log that warmed her feet. These, with the Hoppners, known to
Shelley and Byron, a French sculptress of royalist sympathies, Mlle. de
Fauveau, much admired by Browning, and one of the grandsons of Goethe,
who flits into and out of the scene, were a compensation for the
repulsiveness of certain English folk at Florence who gathered together
only for the frivolities, and worse than frivolities, of foreign
wayfaring.

In March 1849 joy and sorrow met and mingled in the lives of Browning
and his wife. On the ninth of that month a son was born at Casa Guidi,
who six weeks later was described by his mother as "a lovely, fat,
strong child, with double chin and rosy cheeks and a great wide chest."
He was baptised, with the simple Lutheran rites, Robert Wiedemann
Barrett--the "Wiedemann" in remembrance of the maiden name of Browning's
mother. From the first, Browning and his wife, to adopt a phrase from
one of her letters, caught up their parental pleasures with a sort of
passion.[45] Mrs Browning's letters croon with happiness in the beauty,
the strength, the intelligence, the kind-hearted disposition of her boy.
And the boy's father, from the days when he would walk up and down the
terrace of Casa Guidi with the infant in his arms to the last days of
his life, felt to the full the gladness and the repose that came with
this strong bondage of his heart. When little Wiedemann could frame
imperfect speech upon his lips he transformed that name into "Penini,"
which abbreviated to "Pen" became serviceable for domesticities. It was
a fantastic derivation of Nathaniel Hawthorne which connected Penini
with the colossal statue in Florence bearing the name of "Apeninno."
Flush for a time grew jealous, and not altogether without cause.

But the joy was pursued and overtaken by sorrow. A few days after the
birth of his son came tidings of the death of Browning's mother. He had
loved her with a rare degree of passion; the sudden reaction from the
happiness of his wife's safety and his son's birth was terrible; it
almost seemed a wrong to his grief to admit into his consciousness the
new gladness of the time. In this conflict of em