household, leaving its master behind, had been
banished, and there "a happy sorrowful two weeks" were spent. At Cowes a
grief awaited Browning and his wife, for they found Kenyon kind as ever
but grievously broken in health and depressed in spirits. A short visit
to Mrs Browning's married sister at Taunton closed the summer and autumn
in England. Before the end of October they were on their way to
Florence. "The Brownings are long gone back now," wrote Dante Rossetti
in December, "and with them one of my delights--an evening resort where
I never felt unhappy. How large a part of the real world, I wonder, are
those two small people?--taking meanwhile so little room in any railway
carriage and hardly needing a double bed at the inn."

The great event of the autumn for the Brownings and for the lovers of
English poetry was the publication of _Aurora Leigh_. Its popularity was
instantaneous; within a fortnight a second edition was called for; there
was no time to alter even a comma. "That golden-hearted Robert," writes
Mrs Browning, "is in ecstasies about it--far more than if it all related
to a book of his own." The volume was dedicated to John Kenyon; but
before the year was at an end Kenyon was dead. Since the birth of their
son he had enlarged the somewhat slender incomings of his friends by the
annual gift of one hundred pounds, "in order," says the editor of Mrs
Browning's Letters, "that they might be more free to follow their art
for its own sake only." By his will he placed them for the future above
all possibility of straitened means. To Browning he left 6,500 _l_., to
Mrs Browning 4,500 _l_. "These," adds Mr F.G. Kenyon, "were the largest
legacies in a very generous will--the fitting end to a life passed in
acts of generosity and kindness to those in need." The gain to the
Brownings was shadowed by a sense of loss. "Christmas came," says Mrs
Browning, "like a cloud." For the length of three winter months she did
not stir out of doors. Then arrived spring and sunshine, carnival time
and universal madness in Florence, with streets "one gigantic
pantomime." Penini begged importunately for a domino, and could not be
refused; and Penini's father and mother were for once drawn into the
vortex of Italian gaiety. When at the great opera ball a little figure
in mask and domino was struck on the shoulder with the salutation "Bella
mascherina!" it was Mrs Browning who received the stroke, with her
husband, also in domino, by