In what his wife calls a fit of suicidal impatience, he perpetrated the high crime and misdemeanour, and appeared before her wholly unworthy of portraiture with clean-shaven cheeks and chin.  “I cried when I saw him,” she tells his sister, “I was so horror-struck.”  To mark the sin, his beard, when once again he recovered his good looks, was gray, but Mrs Browning cherished the opinion that the argentine touch, as she terms it, gave “a character of elevation and thought to his whole physiognomy.”  To complete this history, it may be added that in 1859 the moustache of his later portraits was first doubtfully permitted and was presently approved with decision as picturesque.[58]

Under all disadvantages of appearance Browning made his way triumphantly in the English and American society of Rome.  The studios were open to him.  In Gibson’s he saw the tinted Venus—­“rather a grisette than a goddess,” pronounced Mrs Browning.  Harriet Hosmer, the young American sculptress, working with true independence, high aims and right woman’s manliness, was both admired and loved.  Thackeray, with his daughters, called at the apartment in the Bocca di Leone, bringing small-talk in “handfuls of glittering dust swept out of salons.”  Lockhart, snow-white in aspect, snow-cold in manner, gave Browning emphatic commendation, though of a negative kind—­“He isn’t at all,” declared Lockhart, “like a damned literary man.”  But of many interesting acquaintances perhaps the most highly valued were Fanny Kemble and her sister Adelaide Sartoris—­Fanny Kemble magnificent, “with her black hair and radiant smile,” her sympathetic voice, “her eyes and eyelids full of utterance”—­a very noble creature indeed; Mrs Sartoris, genial and generous, more tolerant than Fanny of Mrs Browning’s wayward enthusiasms, eloquent in talk and passionate in song.  “The Kembles,” writes Mrs Browning, “were our gain in Rome.”

Towards the end of May 1854 farewells were said, and the Brownings returned from Rome, to Florence by vettura.  They had hoped to visit England, or if this should prove impracticable, to take shelter among the mountains from the summer heat.  But needful coin on which they had reckoned did not arrive; and they resolved in prudence to sit still at Florence and eat their bread and macaroni as poor sensible folk should do.  And Florence looked more beautiful than ever after Rome; the nightingales sang around the olive-trees and vineyards, not only by starlight and fire-fly-light but in the daytime.  “I love the very stones of Florence,” exclaims Mrs Browning.  Her friend Miss Mitford, now in England, and sadly failing in health, hinted at a loan of money; but the answer was a prompt, “Oh no!  My husband has a family likeness to Lucifer in being proud.”  There followed a tranquil and a happy time, and both Men and Women and Aurora Leigh maintained in the writers a deep inward excitement of the kind that leaves an enduring result.  A little joint publication; Two Poems by E.B.B. and R.B., containing A Plea for the Ragged Schools of London and The Twins, was sold at Miss Arabella Barrett’s Ragged School bazaar in 1854.  It is now a waif of literature which collectors prize.  There is special significance in the Date and Dabitur, the twins of Browning’s poem, when we bear in mind the occasion with which it was originally connected.