It is strange that Cavour and Mrs. Browning should have died in the same month, within twenty-three days of each other,—­the one the head, the other the heart of Italy.  As head and heart made up the perfect life, so death was not complete until Heaven welcomed both.  It seemed also strange, that on the night after Mrs. Browning’s decease an unexpected comet should glare ominously out of the sky.  For the moment we were superstitious, and believed in it as a minister of woe.

Great as is this loss, Mrs. Browning’s death is not without a sad consolation.  From the shattered condition of her lungs, the physician feels assured that existence could not at the farthest have been prolonged for more than six months.  Instead of a sudden call to God, life would have slowly ebbed away; and, too feeble for the slightest exertion, she must have been denied the solace of books, of friends, of writing, perhaps of thought even.  God saved her from a living grave, and her husband from protracted misery.  Seeking for the shadow of Mrs. Browning’s self in her poetry, (for she was a rare instance of an author’s superiority to his work,) many an expression is found that welcomes the thought of a change which would free her from the suffering inseparable from her mortality.  There is a yearning for a more fully developed life, to be found most frequently in her sonnets.  She writes at times as though, through weakness of the body, her wings were tied:—­

  “When I attain to utter forth in verse
  Some inward thought, my soul throbs audibly
  Along my pulses, yearning to be free,
  And something farther, fuller, higher rehearse,
  To the individual true, and the universe,
  In consummation of right harmony! 
  But, like a wind-exposed, distorted tree,
  We are blown against forever by the curse
  Which breathes through Nature.  Oh, the world is weak;
  The effluence of each is false to all;
  Add what we best conceive, we fail to speak! 
  Wait, soul, until thine ashen garments fall,
  And then resume thy broken strains, and seek
  Fit peroration without let or thrall!”

The “ashen garments” have fallen,—­

  “And though we must have and have had
  Right reason to be earthly sad,
  Thou Poet-God art great and glad!”

It was meet that Mrs. Browning should come home to die in her Florence, in her Casa Guidi, where she had passed her happy married life, where her boy was born, and where she had watched and rejoiced over the second birth of a great nation.  Her heart-strings did not entwine themselves around Rome as around Florence, and it seems as though life had been so eked out that she might find a lasting sleep in Florence.  Rome holds fast its Shelley and Keats, to whose lowly graves there is many a reverential pilgrimage; and now Florence, no less honored, has its shrine sacred to the memory of Theodore Parker and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.