that their names should be remembered on earth; such shades may stand in a background.  It is, however, strange that Browning who created so many living men and women should in his letters have struck out no swift indelible piece of portraiture; even here his is the inferior touch.  And yet throughout the whole correspondence we cannot but be aware that his is the more massive and the more complex nature; his intellect has hardier thews; his passion has an energy which corresponds with its mass; his will sustains his passion and projects it forward.  And towards Miss Barrett his strength is seen as gentleness, his energy as an inexhaustible patience of hope.

When Browning and his wife reached Paris, Mrs Browning was worn out by the excitement and fatigue.  By a happy accident Mrs Jameson and her niece were at hand, and when the first surprise, with kisses to both fugitives, was over, she persuaded them to rest for a week where they were, promising, if they consented, to be their companion and aider until they arrived at Pisa.  Their “imprudence,” in her eyes, was “the height of prudence”; “wild poets or not” they were “wise people.”  The week at Paris was given up to quietude; once they visited the Louvre, but the hours passed for the most part indoors; it all seemed strange and visionary—­“Whether in the body or out of the body,” wrote Mrs Browning, “I cannot tell scarcely.”  From Paris and Orleans they proceeded southwards in weather, which, notwithstanding some rains, was delightful.  From Avignon they went on pilgrimage to Petrarch’s Vaucluse; Browning bore his wife to a rock in mid stream and seated her there, while Flush scurried after in alarm for his mistress.  In the passage from Marseilles to Genoa, Mrs Browning was able to sit on deck; the change of air, although gained at the expense of some weariness, had done her a world of good.

Early in October the journeying closed at Pisa.  Rooms were taken for six months in the great Collegio Ferdinando, close to the Duomo and the Leaning Tower, rooms not quite the warmest in aspect.  Mrs Jameson pronounced the invalid not improved but transformed.  The repose of the city, asleep, as Dickens described it, in the sun and the secluded life—­a perpetual tete-a-tete, but one so happy—­suited both the wedded friends; days of cloudless weather, following a spell of rain, went by in “reading and writing and talking of all things in heaven and earth, and a little besides; and sometimes even laughing as if we had twenty people to laugh with us, or rather hadn’t.”  Their sole acquaintance was an Italian Professor of the University; for three months they never looked at a newspaper; then a loophole on the world was opened each evening by the arrival of the Siecle.  The lizards were silent friends of one poet, and golden oranges gleamed over the walls to the unaccustomed eyes of the other like sunshine gathered into globes.  They wandered through pine-woods and drove until the purple mountains seemed not far