in, and the same bells rang, and the tree of liberty was pulled down.  The Pope is well-meaning but weak; and before long honorific epithets have to be denied him—­he is merely a Pope; his prestige and power over souls is lost.  The liberal Grand Duke is transformed into a Duke decorated with Austrian titles.  As for France, Mrs Browning had long since learnt from the books she read with so much delight to feel a debt to the country of Balzac and George Sand.  She thought that the unrest and the eager hopes of the French Revolution, notwithstanding its errors, indicated at least the conception of a higher ideal than any known to the English people.  Browning did not possess an equal confidence in France; he did not accept her view that the French occupation of Rome was capable of justification; nor did he enter into her growing hero-worship—­as yet far from its full development—­of Louis Napoleon.  Her admiration for Balzac he shared, and it is probable that the death of the great novelist moved him to keener regret than did the death, at no considerable distance of time, of Wordsworth.  With French communism or socialism neither husband nor wife, however republican in their faith, had sympathy; they held that its tendency is to diminish the influence of the individual, and that in the end the progress of the mass is dependent on the starting forth from the mass and the striding forward of individual minds.  They believed as firmly as did Edmund Burke in the importance of what Burke styles a natural aristocracy.

For four years—­from 1847 to 1851—­Browning never crossed the confines of Italy.  No duties summoned him away, and he was happy in his home.  “We are as happy,” he wrote in December 1847, “as two owls in a hole, two toads under a tree-stump; or any other queer two poking creatures that we let live after the fashion of their black hearts, only Ba is fat and rosy; yes indeed.”  In spring they drove day by day through the Cascine, passing on the way the carven window of the Statue and the Bust, and “the stone called Dante’s,” whereupon

    He used to bring his quiet chair out, turned
    To Brunelleschi’s church.[43]

And after tea there was the bridge of Trinita from which to watch the sunsets turning the Arno to pure gold while the moon and the evening-star hung aloft.  It was a life of retirement and of quiet work.  Mrs Browning mentions to a friend that for fifteen months she could not make her husband spend a single evening out—­“not even to a concert, nor to hear a play of Alfieri’s,” but what with music and books and writing and talking, she adds, “we scarcely know how the days go, it’s such a gallop on the grass.”  The “writing” included the revision and preparation for the press of Browning’s Poems, in two volumes, which Chapman & Hall, more liberal than Moxon, had undertaken to publish at their own risk, and which appeared in 1849.  Some care and thought were also given by Browning to the alterations