On the longer excursions Browning slackened his footsteps to keep pace with his wife’s donkey; basins of strawberries and cream refreshed the wanderers after their exertion.  “Oh those jagged mountains,” exclaims Mrs Browning, “rolled together like pre-Adamite beasts, and setting their teeth against the sky....  You may as well guess at a lion by a lady’s lap-dog as at Nature by what you see in England.  All honour to England, lanes and meadowland, notwithstanding.  To the great trees above all.”  The sculptor Story and his family, whose acquaintance they had made in Florence before Casa Guidi had become their home, were their neighbours at the Baths, and Robert Lytton was for a time their guest.  Browning worked at his Men and Women, of which his wife was able to report in the autumn that it was in an advanced state. In a Balcony was the most important achievement of the summer.  “The scene of the declaration in By the Fireside” Mrs Orr informs us, “was laid in a little adjacent mountain-gorge to which Browning walked or rode.”

Only a few weeks were given to Florence.  In perfect autumnal weather the occupants of Casa Guidi started for Rome.  The delightful journey occupied eight days, and on the way the church of Assisi was seen, and the falls of Terni—­“that passion of the waters,”—­so Mrs Browning describes it, “which makes the human heart seem so still.”  They entered Rome in a radiant mood.—­“Robert and Penini singing.”  An apartment had been taken for them by their friends the Storys in the Via Bocca di Leone, and all was bright, warm, and full of comfort.  Next morning a shadow fell upon their happiness—­the Storys’ little boy was seized with convulsions; in the evening he was dead.[57] A second child—­a girl—­was taken ill in the Brownings’ house, and could not be moved from where she lay in a room below their apartment.  Mrs Browning was in a panic for her own boy, though his apple-red cheeks spoke of health.  Rome, for a time, was darkened with grief and anxiety; nor did the city itself impress her as she had expected:  “It’s a palimpsest Rome,” she writes, “a watering-place written over the antique.”  The chief gains of these Roman months were those of friendship and pleasant acquaintances added to those already given by Italy.  In rooms under those occupied by the Brownings was Page the American artist, who painted in colours then regarded as “Venetian,” now almost darkened out of existence, as a gift for Mrs Browning, the portrait of Robert Browning exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1856.  Browning himself wrote to Story with enthusiasm of Page’s work.  “I am much disappointed in it,” wrote Dante Rossetti to Allingham, “and shall advise its non-exhibition.”  A second portrait painted at this time—­that by Fisher—­is familiar to us through a reproduction in the second volume of The Letters of Mrs Browning.  A rash act of the morning of the day on which he entered Rome had deplorably altered Browning’s appearance.