Leaving Corfu with freedom from any local obligations, and a keen enjoyment of the change from life in England, we decided to establish ourselves for a time in Florence, where we passed the whole of the summer.  In October a son was born to us, and we took a house and furnished it.  I took a studio, too, and returned to painting, as well as the long interval permitted me to gather up the threads of habit.  Art is not to be followed in that way, and there is no cause for surprise, nor, perhaps, for regret, that literature had the stronger hold on my mind; and that, between the “Times,” letters for which were provoked by so many themes of interest to the English public, and archaeology, especially the study of the prehistoric monuments of central Italy, so important in their yet hardly determined relations to the classical world, the pencil found less attraction than the pen.  To my wife, whose enjoyment of Italian art was intense, Florence was an ideal residence; and on some accounts I still regret the circumstances which drove us out of the lily city,—­to me still the most desirable residence I have ever known, when one is able to adapt one’s self to the life there.  After the first summer we found the Italian Alps one of the most delectable of retreats, Cadore and Auronzo, with Cortina and Landro,—­all places full of picturesque and natural fascination.  And now, as the strength wanes and we live more in memory than in act, the recollection of the summers passed in the land of Titian remains a gallery of the most delightful pictures.

At Cortina I met and first knew Browning, who, with his sister Sariana, our old and dear friend, came to stay at the inn where we were.  I am not much inclined to reckon intellectual greatness as a personal charm, for experience has shown me that the relation is very remote; but Browning always impressed me—­and then and after I saw a good deal of him—­as one of the healthiest and most robust minds I have ever known, sound to the core, and with an almost unlimited intellectual vitality and an individuality which nothing could infringe on, but which a singular sensitiveness towards others prevented from ever wounding even the most morbid sensibility; a strong man armed in the completest defensive armor, but with no aggressive quality.  His was a nature of utter sincerity, and what had seemed to me, reading his poetry before knowing him, to be more or less an affectation of obscurity, a cultivation of the cryptic sense, I found to be the pure expression of his individuality.  He made short cuts to the heart of his theme, perhaps more unconscious than uncaring that his line of approach could not be followed by his general readers, as a mathematician leaves a large hiatus in his demonstration, seeing the result the less experienced must work out step by step.