aven and earth," Mrs. Browning wrote, "since our arrival at Venice."
The rich architecture, the colour, the moonlight, the music, the
enchanting silence made up a unity of pleasures like nothing that she
had previously known. When evening came she and her husband would follow
the opera from their box hired for "two shillings and eightpence
English," or sit under the moon in the piazza of St Mark sipping coffee
and reading the French papers. But as the month went by, Browning lost
appetite and lost sleep. The "soothing, lulling, rocking atmosphere"
which suited Mrs. Browning made him, after the first excitement of
delight, grow nervous and dispirited. They hastened away to Padua, drove
to Arqua, "for Petrarch's sake," passed through Brescia in a flood of
white moonlight, and having reached Milan climbed--the invalid of
Wimpole Street and her husband--to the topmost point of the cathedral.
From the Italian lakes they crossed by the St Gothard to Switzerland,
and omitting part of their original scheme of wandering, journeyed in
twenty-four hours without stopping from Strasburg to Paris.

In Paris they loitered for three weeks. Mrs. Browning during the short
visit which followed her marriage had hardly seen the city. Bright
shop-windows, before which little Wiedemann would scream with pleasure,
restaurants and dinners _a la carte_, full-foliaged trees and gardens in
the heart of the town were a not unwelcome exchange for Italian
church-interiors and altar-pieces. Even "disreputable prints and
fascinating hats and caps" were appreciated as proper to the genius of
the place, and the writer of _Casa Guidi Windows_ had the happiness of
seeing her hero, M. le President, "in a cocked hat, and with a train of
cavalry, passing like a rocket along the boulevards to an occasional
yell from the Red." By a happy chance they lighted in Paris upon
Tennyson, now Poet-laureate, whom Mrs. Browning had hitherto known only
through his poems; he was in the friendliest mood, and urged that they
should make use of his house and servants during their stay in England,
an offer which was not refused, though there was no intention of
actually taking advantage of the kindness. As for England, the thought
of it, with her father's heart and her father's door closed against her,
was bitter as wormwood to Mrs. Browning. "It's only Robert," she wrote,
"who is a patriot now, of us two."

English soil as they stepped ashore was a puddle, and English air a