with regret that the old church
at Pornic, where the beautiful white girl of his poem had been buried,
was disappearing to give space in front of a new and smart erection of
brick and stucco. His Florence, as he learnt, was also altering, and he
lamented the change. Every detail of the Italian days lived in his
memory; the violets and ground ivy on a certain old wall; the fig tree
behind the Siena villa, under which his wife would sit and read, and
"poor old Landor's oak." "I never hear of any one going to Florence," he
wrote in 1870, "but my heart is twitched." He would like to "glide for a
long summer-day through the streets and between the old
stone-walls--unseen come and unheard go." But he must guard himself
against being overwhelmed by recollection: "Oh, me! to find myself some
late sunshiny Sunday afternoon, with my face turned to Florence--'ten
minutes to the gate, ten minutes _home_!' I think I should fairly end it
all on the spot."[93]

Other changes sadder than the loss of old Norman pillars and ornaments,
or new barbarous structures, run up beside Poggio, were happening. In
May 1866 Browning's father, kind and cheery old man, was unwell; in June
Miss Browning telegraphed for her brother, and he arrived in Paris
twenty-four hours before the end. The elder Browning had almost
completed his eighty-fifth year. To the last he retained what his son
described as "his own strange sweetness of soul." It was the close of a
useful, unworldly, unambitious life, full of innocent enjoyment and deep
affection. The occasion was not one for intemperate grief, but the sense
of loss was great. Miss Browning, whose devotion during many years first
to her mother, then to her widowed father, had been entire, now became
her brother's constant companion. They rested for the summer at Le
Croisic, a little town in Brittany, in a delightfully spacious old
house, with the sea to right and left, through whose great rushing
waves Browning loved to battle, and, inland, a wild country, picturesque
with its flap-hatted, white-clad, baggy-breeched villagers. Their
enjoyment was unspoilt even by some weeks of disagreeable weather, and
to the same place, which Browning has described in his _Two Poets of
Croisic_--

Croisic, the spit of sandy rock which juts
Spitefully north,

they returned in the following summer. During this second visit
(September 1867) that most spirited ballad of French heroism, _Herve
Riel_, was written, tho