As a matter of fact they did, and to such good intent that they seem never to have had one hour of dissatisfaction, never one jar in the music of their lives.

What a happy wayfaring through France that must have been!  The travelling had to be slow, and with frequent interruptions, on account of Mrs. Browning’s health:  yet she steadily improved, and was almost from the start able to take more exercise, and to be longer in the open air than had for long been her wont.  They passed southward, and after some novel experiences in diligences, reached Avignon, where they rested for a couple of days.  Thence a little expedition, a poetical pilgrimage, was made to Vaucluse, sacred to the memory of Petrarch and Laura.  There, as Mrs. Macpherson has told us, at the very source of the “chiare, fresche e dolce acque,” Browning took his wife up in his arms, and, carrying her across through the shallow curling waters, seated her on a rock that rose throne-like in the middle of the stream.  Thus, indeed, did love and poetry take a new possession of the spot immortalised by Petrarch’s loving fancy.

Three weeks passed happily before Pisa, the Brownings’ destination, was reached.  But even then the friends were unwilling to part, and Mrs. Jameson and her niece remained in the deserted old city for a score of days longer.  So wonderful was the change wrought in Mrs. Browning by happiness, and by all the enfranchisement her marriage meant for her, that, as her friend wrote to Miss Mitford, “she is not merely improved but transformed.”  In the new sunshine which had come into her life, she blossomed like a flower-bud long delayed by gloom and chill.  Her heart, in truth, was like a lark when wafted skyward by the first spring-wind.

At last to her there had come something of that peace she had longed for, and though, in the joy of her new life, her genius “like an Arab bird slept floating in the wind,” it was with that restful hush which precedes the creative storm.  There is something deeply pathetic in her conscious joy.  So little actual experience of life had been hers that in many respects she was as a child:  and she had all the child’s yearning for those unsullied hours that never come when once they are missed.  But it was not till love unfastened the inner chambers of her heart and brain that she realised to the full, what she had often doubted, how supreme a thing mere life is.  It was in some such mood that she wrote the lovely forty-second of the “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” closing thus—­

                            “Let us stay
      Rather on earth, Beloved,—­where the unfit
      Contrarious moods of men recoil away
      And isolate pure spirits, and permit
      A place to stand and love in for a day,
      With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.”