Apart from his anxieties for his wife’s health and the unfailing pleasure in his boy, whom a French or Italian abbe now instructed, Browning was wholly absorbed in one new interest.  He had long been an accomplished musician; in Paris he had devoted himself to drawing; now his passion was for modelling in clay, and the work proceeded under the direction and in the studio of his friend, the sculptor Story.  His previous studies in anatomy stood him in good stead; he made remarkable progress, and six hours a day passed as if in an enchantment.  He ceased even to read; “nothing but clay does he care for,” says Mrs Browning smilingly, “poor lost soul.”  The union of intellectual energy with physical effort in such work gave him the complete satisfaction for which he craved.  His wife “grudged a little,” she says, the time stolen from his special art of poetry; but she saw that his health and spirits gained from his happy occupation.  Of late, he had laboured irregularly at verse; fits of active effort were followed by long intervals during which production seemed impossible.  And some vent was necessary for the force coiled up within him; if this were not to be obtained, he wore himself out with a nervous impatience—­“beating his dear head,” as Mrs Browning describes it, “against the wall, simply because he sees a fly there, magnified by his own two eyes almost indefinitely into some Saurian monster.”  Now he was well and even exultant—­“nothing ever,” he declared, “made him so happy before.”  Of advancing years—­Browning was now nearly forty-nine—­the only symptoms were that he had lost his youthful slightness of figure, and that his beard and hair were somewhat blanched by time.  “The women,” his wife wrote to his sister, “adore him everywhere far too much for decency,” and to herself he seemed “infinitely handsomer and more attractive” than when, sixteen years previously, she had first seen him.  On the whole therefore she was well pleased with his new passion for clay, and could wish for him loads of the plastic stuff in which to riot.  Afterwards, in his days of sorrow in London, when he compared the colour of his life to that of a snow-cloud, it seemed to him as if one minute of these months at Rome would yield him gold enough to make the brightness of a year; he longed for the smell of the wet clay in Story’s studio, where the songs of the birds, and the bleat of a goat coming through the little door to the left, were heard.[81]

While hoping and planning for the future, his wife was not unaware of her own decline.  “For the first time,” she writes about December, “I have had pain in looking into Penini’s face lately—­which you will understand.”  And a little earlier:  “I wish to live just as long as, and no longer than to grow in the soul.”  The winter was mild, though snow had fallen once; a spell of colder weather was reserved for the month of May.  They thought of meeting Browning’s father and sister in some picturesque part of the forest of Fontainebleau,