Ancona, where the poem was written, if its last line is historically true, followed Fano, among whose brown rocks, “elbowing out the purple tides,” and brown houses—­“an exfoliation of the rock”—­they lived for a week on fish and cold water.  The tour included Rimini and Ravenna, with a return to Florence by Forli and a passage through the Apennines.  Next year—­1849—­when Pen was a few months old, the drop of gipsy blood in Browning’s veins, to which his wife jestingly refers, tingled but faintly; it was Mrs Browning’s part to compel him, for the baby’s sake and hers, to seek his own good.  They visited Spezzia and glanced at the house of Shelley at Lerici; passed through olive woods and vineyards, and rested in “a sort of eagle’s nest” at the highest habitable point of the Baths of Lucca.  Here the baby’s great cheeks grew rosier; Browning gained in spirits; and his wife was able “to climb the hills and help him to lose himself in the forests.”  When they wandered at noon except for some bare-footed peasant or some monk with the rope around his waist, it was complete solitude; and on moonlit nights they sat by the waterfalls in an atmosphere that had the lightness of mountain air without its keenness.  On one occasion they climbed by dry torrent courses five miles into the mountains, baby and all, on horseback and donkeyback—­“such a congregation of mountains; looking alive in the stormy light we saw them by.”  It was certainly a blessed transformation of the prostrate invalid in the upper room at Wimpole Street.  Setting aside his own happiness, Browning could feel with regard to her and his deep desire to serve her, that he had seen of the travail of his soul, and in this matter was satisfied.

The weeks at Siena of the year 1850 were not quite so prosperous.  During that summer Mrs Browning had been seriously ill.  When sufficiently recovered she was carried by her husband to a villa in the midst of vines and olives, a mile and a half or two miles outside Siena, which commanded a noble prospect of hills and plain.  At first she could only remain seated in the easy-chair which he found for her in the city.  For a day there was much alarm on behalf of the boy, now able to run about, who lay with heavy head and glassy eyes in a half-stupor; but presently he was astir again, and his “singing voice” was heard in the house and garden.  Mrs Browning in the fresh yet warm September air regained her strength.  Before returning to Florence, they spent a week in the city to see the churches and the pictures by Sodoma.  Even little Wiedemann screamed for church-interiors and developed remarkable imitative pietisms of a theatrical kind.  “It was as well,” said Browning, “to have the eyeteeth and the Puseyistical crisis over together.”