his mother's
description--was attacked in the same way as Lytton. "Don't be unhappy
for _me_" said Pen; "think it's a poor little boy in the street, and be
just only a little sorry, and not unhappy at all." Within less than a
fortnight he was well enough to have "agonising visions of beefsteak
pies and buttered toast seen in _mirage_"; but his mother mourned for
the rosy cheeks and round fat little shoulders, and confessed that she
herself was worn out in body and soul.

The winter at Florence was the coldest for many years; the edges of the
Arno were frozen; and in the spring of 1858 Mrs Browning felt that her
powers of resistance, weakened by a year of troubles and anxieties, had
fallen low. Browning himself was in vigorous health. When he called in
June on Hawthorne he looked younger and even handsomer than he had
looked two years previously, and his gray hairs seemed fewer. "He
talked," Hawthorne goes on, "a wonderful quantity in a little time."
That evening the Hawthornes spent at Casa Guidi. Mrs Browning is
described by the American novelist as if she were one of the singular
creatures of his own imagination--no earthly woman but one of the elfin
race, yet sweetly disposed towards human beings; a wonder of charm in
littleness; with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice; "there is not such
another figure in the world; and her black ringlets cluster into her
neck, and make her face look whiter by their sable perfection." Browning
himself was "very efficient in keeping up conversation with everybody,
and seemed to be in all parts of the room and in every group at the same
moment; a most vivid and quick-thoughted person--logical and
common-sensible, as, I presume, poets generally are in their daily
talk." "His conversation," says Hawthorne, speaking of a visit to Miss
Blagden at Bellosguardo, "has the effervescent aroma which you cannot
catch even if you get the very words that seem to be imbued with it....
His nonsense is of very genuine and excellent quality, the true babble
and effervescence of a bright and powerful mind; and he lets it play
among his friends with the faith and simplicity of a child."

When summer came it was decided to join Browning's father and sister in
Paris, and accompany them to some French seaside resort, where Mrs
Browning could have the benefit of a course of warm salt-water baths. To
her the sea was a terror, but railway-travelling was repose, and
Browning suggested on the way from Marseil