In April it was summer weather; the drives of former days in the Cascine and to Bellosguardo, where a warm-hearted friend, Miss Isa Blagden, occupied a villa, were resumed.  An American authoress of wider fame since her book of 1852 than even the authoress of Aurora Leigh, Mrs Beecher Stowe, was in Florence, and somewhat to their surprise she charmed both Browning and his wife by her simplicity and earnestness, her gentle voice and refinement of manner—­“never,” says Mrs Browning, “did lioness roar more softly.”  All pointed to renewed happiness; but before April was over pain of a kind that had a peculiar sting left Mrs Browning for a time incapable of any other feeling.  Her father was dead, and no word of affection had been uttered at the last; if there was water in the rock it never welled forth.  The kindly meant effort of a relative to reopen friendly communications between Mr Barrett and his daughters, not many months previously, had for its only result the declaration that they had disgraced the family.[71] At first Mrs Browning was crushed and could shed no tear; she remained for many days in a state of miserable prostration; it was two months before she could write a letter to anyone outside the circle of her nearest kinsfolk.

Once more the July heat in Florence—­“a composition of Gehenna and Paradise”—­drove the Brownings to the Baths of Lucca.  Miss Blagden followed them, and also young Lytton came, ailing, it was thought, from exposure to the sun.  His indisposition soon grew serious and declared itself as a gastric fever.  For eight nights Isa Blagden sat by his bedside as nurse; for eight other nights Browning took her place.  His own health remained vigorous.  Each morning he bathed in a rapid mountain stream; each evening and morning he rode a mountain pony; and in due time he had the happiness of seeing the patient, although still weak and hollow cheeked, convalescent and beginning to think of “poems and apple puddings,” as Mrs Browning declares, “in a manner other than celestial.”  It had been a summer, she said in September, full of blots, vexations, anxieties.  Three days after these words were written a new and grave anxiety troubled her and her husband, for their son, who had been looking like a rose—­“like a rose possessed by a fairy” is his mother’s description—­was attacked in the same way as Lytton.  “Don’t be unhappy for me” said Pen; “think it’s a poor little boy in the street, and be just only a little sorry, and not unhappy at all.”  Within less than a fortnight he was well enough to have “agonising visions of beefsteak pies and buttered toast seen in mirage”; but his mother mourned for the rosy cheeks and round fat little shoulders, and confessed that she herself was worn out in body and soul.