The winter at Florence was the coldest for many years; the edges of the Arno were frozen; and in the spring of 1858 Mrs Browning felt that her powers of resistance, weakened by a year of troubles and anxieties, had fallen low.  Browning himself was in vigorous health.  When he called in June on Hawthorne he looked younger and even handsomer than he had looked two years previously, and his gray hairs seemed fewer.  “He talked,” Hawthorne goes on, “a wonderful quantity in a little time.”  That evening the Hawthornes spent at Casa Guidi.  Mrs Browning is described by the American novelist as if she were one of the singular creatures of his own imagination—­no earthly woman but one of the elfin race, yet sweetly disposed towards human beings; a wonder of charm in littleness; with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice; “there is not such another figure in the world; and her black ringlets cluster into her neck, and make her face look whiter by their sable perfection.”  Browning himself was “very efficient in keeping up conversation with everybody, and seemed to be in all parts of the room and in every group at the same moment; a most vivid and quick-thoughted person—­logical and common-sensible, as, I presume, poets generally are in their daily talk.”  “His conversation,” says Hawthorne, speaking of a visit to Miss Blagden at Bellosguardo, “has the effervescent aroma which you cannot catch even if you get the very words that seem to be imbued with it....  His nonsense is of very genuine and excellent quality, the true babble and effervescence of a bright and powerful mind; and he lets it play among his friends with the faith and simplicity of a child.”

When summer came it was decided to join Browning’s father and sister in Paris, and accompany them to some French seaside resort, where Mrs Browning could have the benefit of a course of warm salt-water baths.  To her the sea was a terror, but railway-travelling was repose, and Browning suggested on the way from Marseilles to Paris that they might “ride, ride together, for ever ride” during the remainder of their lives in a first-class carriage with for-ever renewed supplies of French novels and Galignanis.  They reached Paris on the elder Mr Browning’s birthday, and found him radiant at the meeting with his son and grandson, looking, indeed, ten years younger than when they had last seen his face.  Paris, Mrs Browning declares, was her “weakness,” Italy her “passion”; Florence itself was her “chimney-corner,” where she “could sulk and be happy.”  The life of the brilliant city, which “murmurs so of the fountain of intellectual youth for ever and ever,” quickened her heart-beats; its new architectural splendours told of the magnificence in design and in its accomplishment of her hero the Emperor.  And here she and her husband met their helpful friend of former days, Father Prout, and they were both grieved and cheered by the sight of Lady Elgin, a paralytic, in her garden-chair, not able to articulate a word, but bright and gracious as ever, “the eloquent soul full and radiant, alive to both worlds.”  The happiness in presence of such a victory of the spirit was greater than the pain.