ut her spirits were languid; "I gather
myself up by fits and starts," she confesses, "and then fall back."

Apart from his anxieties for his wife's health and the unfailing
pleasure in his boy, whom a French or Italian abbe now instructed,
Browning was wholly absorbed in one new interest. He had long been an
accomplished musician; in Paris he had devoted himself to drawing; now
his passion was for modelling in clay, and the work proceeded under the
direction and in the studio of his friend, the sculptor Story. His
previous studies in anatomy stood him in good stead; he made remarkable
progress, and six hours a day passed as if in an enchantment. He ceased
even to read; "nothing but clay does he care for," says Mrs Browning
smilingly, "poor lost soul." The union of intellectual energy with
physical effort in such work gave him the complete satisfaction for
which he craved. His wife "grudged a little," she says, the time stolen
from his special art of poetry; but she saw that his health and spirits
gained from his happy occupation. Of late, he had laboured irregularly
at verse; fits of active effort were followed by long intervals during
which production seemed impossible. And some vent was necessary for the
force coiled up within him; if this were not to be obtained, he wore
himself out with a nervous impatience--"beating his dear head," as Mrs
Browning describes it, "against the wall, simply because he sees a fly
there, magnified by his own two eyes almost indefinitely into some
Saurian monster." Now he was well and even exultant--"nothing ever," he
declared, "made him so happy before." Of advancing years--Browning was
now nearly forty-nine--the only symptoms were that he had lost his
youthful slightness of figure, and that his beard and hair were somewhat
blanched by time. "The women," his wife wrote to his sister, "adore him
everywhere far too much for decency," and to herself he seemed
"infinitely handsomer and more attractive" than when, sixteen years
previously, she had first seen him. On the whole therefore she was well
pleased with his new passion for clay, and could wish for him loads of
the plastic stuff in which to riot. Afterwards, in his days of sorrow
in London, when he compared the colour of his life to that of a
snow-cloud, it seemed to him as if one minute of these months at Rome
would yield him gold enough to make the brightness of a year; he longed
for the smell of the wet clay in Story's studio, where