The political condition of Italy was, indeed, a grief to both husband and wife.  It was a state of utter prostration—­on all sides “the unanimity of despair.”  The Grand Duke, the emancipator, had acquired a respect and affection for the bayonets of Austria.  The Pope was “wriggling his venom into the heart of all possibilities of free-thought and action.”  Browning groaned “How long, O Lord, how long?” His home-thoughts of England in contrast with Italy were those of patriotism and pride.  His wife was more detached, more critical towards her native land.  The best symptom for Italian freedom was that if Italy had not energy to act, she yet had energy to hate.  To be happy now they both must turn to imaginative work, and gain all the gains possible from private friendships.  Browning was already occupied with the poems included afterwards in the volumes of Men and Women.  Mrs Browning was already engaged upon Aurora Leigh.  “We neither of us show our work to one another,” she wrote, “till it is finished.  An artist must, I fancy, either find or make a solitude to work in, if it is to be good work at all.”  But as her husband’s poems, one by one, were completed, she saw them, and they seemed to her as fine as anything he had done.  Away in England Colombe’s Birthday was given on the stage, with Helen Faucit in the leading part.  It was at least an indication that the public had not forgotten that Browning was a poet.  Here in Florence, although the hermit life was happy, new friends—­the gift of England—­added to its happiness.  Frederick Tennyson, the Laureate’s brother, and himself a true poet in his degree, “a dreamy, shy, speculative man,” simple withal and truthful, had married an Italian wife and was settled for a time in Florence.  To him Browning became attached with genuine affection.  Mrs Browning was a student of the writings of Swedenborg, and she tells much of her new friend in a single Swedenborgian word—­“selfhood, the proprium, is not in him.”  Frederick Tennyson, though left in a state of bewilderment by Browning’s poetry, found the writer of the poetry “a man of infinite learning, jest and bonhommie, and moreover a sterling heart that reverbs no hollowness."[53] Another intimate who charmed them much was one of the attaches of the English embassy, and a poet of unquestionable faculty, very young, very gentle and refined, delicate and excitable, full of sensibility, “full of all sorts of goodness and nobleness,” but somewhat dreamy and unpractical, “visionary enough,” writes Mrs Browning, “to suit me,” interested moreover in spiritualism, which suited her well, “never,” she unwisely prophesied, “to be a great diplomatist.”  It was hardly, Mr Kenyon, the editor of her letters, observes, a successful horoscope of the destiny of Lord Lytton, the future Ambassador at Paris and Viceroy of India.[54]