you to go into the room and say,’Papa, I’ll be dood.’” But the situation, as Mrs Browning sadly confesses, was hopeless.  Some companionship with her sister Arabel and her brothers was gained by a swift departure from London in August for Ventnor whither the Wimpole Street household, leaving its master behind, had been banished, and there “a happy sorrowful two weeks” were spent.  At Cowes a grief awaited Browning and his wife, for they found Kenyon kind as ever but grievously broken in health and depressed in spirits.  A short visit to Mrs Browning’s married sister at Taunton closed the summer and autumn in England.  Before the end of October they were on their way to Florence.  “The Brownings are long gone back now,” wrote Dante Rossetti in December, “and with them one of my delights—­an evening resort where I never felt unhappy.  How large a part of the real world, I wonder, are those two small people?—­taking meanwhile so little room in any railway carriage and hardly needing a double bed at the inn.”

The great event of the autumn for the Brownings and for the lovers of English poetry was the publication of Aurora Leigh.  Its popularity was instantaneous; within a fortnight a second edition was called for; there was no time to alter even a comma.  “That golden-hearted Robert,” writes Mrs Browning, “is in ecstasies about it—­far more than if it all related to a book of his own.”  The volume was dedicated to John Kenyon; but before the year was at an end Kenyon was dead.  Since the birth of their son he had enlarged the somewhat slender incomings of his friends by the annual gift of one hundred pounds, “in order,” says the editor of Mrs Browning’s Letters, “that they might be more free to follow their art for its own sake only.”  By his will he placed them for the future above all possibility of straitened means.  To Browning he left 6,500 l., to Mrs Browning 4,500 l.  “These,” adds Mr F.G.  Kenyon, “were the largest legacies in a very generous will—­the fitting end to a life passed in acts of generosity and kindness to those in need.”  The gain to the Brownings was shadowed by a sense of loss.  “Christmas came,” says Mrs Browning, “like a cloud.”  For the length of three winter months she did not stir out of doors.  Then arrived spring and sunshine, carnival time and universal madness in Florence, with streets “one gigantic pantomime.”  Penini begged importunately for a domino, and could not be refused; and Penini’s father and mother were for once drawn into the vortex of Italian gaiety.  When at the great opera ball a little figure in mask and domino was struck on the shoulder with the salutation “Bella mascherina!” it was Mrs Browning who received the stroke, with her husband, also in domino, by her side.  The absence of real coarseness in the midst of so much seeming license, and the perfect social equality gave her a gratifying impression of her Florentines.