of Robert Browning, was a sufficient introduction to cultivated Englishmen and Americans who had made Florence their home.  Among the earliest of these acquaintances were the American sculptor Powers, Swedenborgian and spiritualist (a simple and genial man, “with eyes like a wild Indian’s, so black and full of light"), and Hillard, the American lawyer, who, in his Six months in Italy, described Browning’s conversation as “like the poetry of Chaucer,” meaning perhaps that it was hearty, fresh, and vigorous, “or like his own poetry simplified and made transparent.”  “It seems impossible,” Hillard goes on, “to think that he can ever grow old.”  And of Mrs Browning:  “I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit.  She is a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl.”  A third American friend was one who could bring tidings of Emerson and Hawthorne—­Margaret Fuller of “The Dial,” now Countess d’Ossoli, “far better than her writings,” says Mrs Browning, “... not only exalted but exaltee in her opinions, yet calm in manner.”  Her loss, with that of her husband, on their voyage to America deeply affected Mrs Browning.  “Was she happy in anything?” asks her sorrowing friend.  The first person seen on Italian soil when Browning and his wife disembarked at Leghorn was the brilliant and erratic Irish priest, “Father Prout” of Fraser’s Magazine, who befriended them with good spirits and a potion of eggs and port wine when Browning was ill in Florence, and chided Mrs Browning as a “bambina” for her needless fears.  Charles Lever “with the sunniest of faces and cordialest of manners”—­animal spirits preponderating a little too much over an energetic intellect—­called on them at the Baths of Lucca, but the acquaintance did not ripen into friendship.  And little Miss Boyle, one of the family of the Earls of Cork, would come at night, at the hour of chestnuts and mulled wine, to sparkle as vivaciously as the pine-log that warmed her feet.  These, with the Hoppners, known to Shelley and Byron, a French sculptress of royalist sympathies, Mlle. de Fauveau, much admired by Browning, and one of the grandsons of Goethe, who flits into and out of the scene, were a compensation for the repulsiveness of certain English folk at Florence who gathered together only for the frivolities, and worse than frivolities, of foreign wayfaring.

In March 1849 joy and sorrow met and mingled in the lives of Browning and his wife.  On the ninth of that month a son was born at Casa Guidi, who six weeks later was described by his mother as “a lovely, fat, strong child, with double chin and rosy cheeks and a great wide chest.”  He was baptised, with the simple Lutheran rites, Robert Wiedemann Barrett—­the “Wiedemann” in remembrance of the maiden name of Browning’s mother.  From the first, Browning and his wife, to adopt a phrase from one of her letters, caught up their parental pleasures with a sort of passion.[45] Mrs Browning’s