letters croon with happiness in the beauty, the strength, the intelligence, the kind-hearted disposition of her boy.  And the boy’s father, from the days when he would walk up and down the terrace of Casa Guidi with the infant in his arms to the last days of his life, felt to the full the gladness and the repose that came with this strong bondage of his heart.  When little Wiedemann could frame imperfect speech upon his lips he transformed that name into “Penini,” which abbreviated to “Pen” became serviceable for domesticities.  It was a fantastic derivation of Nathaniel Hawthorne which connected Penini with the colossal statue in Florence bearing the name of “Apeninno.”  Flush for a time grew jealous, and not altogether without cause.

But the joy was pursued and overtaken by sorrow.  A few days after the birth of his son came tidings of the death of Browning’s mother.  He had loved her with a rare degree of passion; the sudden reaction from the happiness of his wife’s safety and his son’s birth was terrible; it almost seemed a wrong to his grief to admit into his consciousness the new gladness of the time.  In this conflict of emotions his spirits and to some extent his health gave way.  He could not think of returning to his father’s home without extreme pain—­“It would break his heart,” he said, “to see his mother’s roses over the wall, and the place where she used to lay her scissors and gloves.”  He longed that his father and sister should quit the home of sorrow, and hasten to Florence; but this was not to be.  As for England, it could not be thought of as much on his wife’s account as his own.  Her father held no communication with her; supplicating letters remained unnoticed; her brothers were temporarily estranged.  Her sister Henrietta had left her former home; having “insulted” her father by asking his consent to her marriage with Captain Surtees Cook, she had taken the matter into her own hands; the deed was done, and the name of his second undutiful daughter—­married to a person of moderate means and odiously “Tractarian views”—­was never again to be mentioned in Mr Barrett’s presence.  England had become for Mrs Browning a place of painful memories, and a centre of present strife which she did not feel herself as yet able to encounter.

The love of wandering, however, when successive summers came, and Florence was ablaze with sunshine, grew irresistible, and drove Browning and his household to seek elsewhere for fresh interests or for coolness and repose.  In 1848, beguiled by the guide-book, they visited Fano to find it quivering with heat, “the very air swooning in the sun.”  Their reward at Fano was that picture by Guercino of the guardian angel teaching a child to pray, the thought of which Browning has translated into song: 

    We were at Fano, and three times we went
     To sit and see him in his chapel there,
    And drink his beauty to our soul’s content
    —­My angel with me too.