But it was not long before this sorrow was followed by a very much sorer one—­by the worst of all that could have happened to me!  After what I have written in the last chapter it is needless to say anything of the blank despair that fell upon me when my wife died, on the 13th of April, 1865.  She also lies near the others.

My house was indeed left unto me desolate, and I thought that life and all its sweetness was over for me!

I immediately took measures for disposing of the house in the Piazza dell’ Independenza, and before long found a purchaser for it.  I had bought it when the speculator, who had become the owner of the ground at the corner of the space which was beginning to assume the semblance of a “square” or “piazza,” had put in the foundations but had not proceeded much further with his work.  I completed it, improving largely, as I thought, on his plan; adapted it for a single residence, instead of its division into sundry dwellings; obtained possession of additional ground between the house and the city wall, sufficient for a large garden; built around it, looking to the south, the largest and handsomest “stanzone"[1] for orange and lemon plants in Florence, and gathered together a collection of very fine trees, the profits from which (much smaller in my hands than would have been the case in those of a Florentine to the manner born) nevertheless abundantly sufficed to defray the expenses of the garden and gardeners.  In a word, I made the place a very complete and comfortable residence.  Nearly the whole of my first married life was spent in it.  And much of the literary work of my life has been done in it.

[Footnote 1:  “Stanzone” is the term used in Tuscany to signify the buildings destined to shelter the “Agrumi,” as the orange and lemon plants are called generically, in the winter; which in Florence is too severe to permit of their being left in the open air.]

I used in those days, and for very many years afterwards, to do all my writing standing; and I strongly recommend the practice to brother quill-drivers.  Pauses, often considerable intervals, occur for thought while the pen is in the hand.  And if one is seated at a table, one remains sitting during these intervals.  But if one is standing, it becomes natural to one, during even a small pause, to take a turn up and down the room, or even, as I often used to do, in the garden.  And such change and movement I consider eminently salutary both for mind and body.

I had specially contrived a little window immediately above the desk at which I stood, fixed to the wall.  The room looking on the “loggia,” which was the scene of the little poem transcribed in the preceding chapter, was abundantly lighted, but I liked some extra light close to my desk.

In that room my Bice was born.  For it was subsequently to her birth that the destination of it was changed from a bedroom to a study.

Few men have passed years of more unchequered happiness than I did in that house.  And I was very fond of it.