Their Pisan home was amid sacred associations.  It was situate in an old palazzo built by Vasari, within sight of the Leaning Tower and the Duomo.  There, in absolute seclusion, they wrote and planned.  Once and again they made a pilgrimage to the Lanfranchi Palace “to walk in the footsteps of Byron and Shelley”:  occasionally they went to Vespers in the Duomo, and listened, rapt, to the music wandering spirally through the vast solitary building:  once they were fortunate in hearing the impressive musical mass for the dead, in the Campo Santo.  They were even reminded often of their distant friend Horne, for every time they crossed one of the chief piazzas they saw the statue of Cosimo de Medici looking down upon them.

In this beautiful old city, so full of repose as it lies “asleep in the sun,” Mrs. Browning’s health almost leapt, so swift was her advance towards vigour.  “She is getting better every day,” wrote her husband, “stronger, better wonderfully, and beyond all our hopes.”

That happy first winter they passed “in the most secluded manner, reading Vasari, and dreaming dreams of seeing Venice in the summer.”  But early in April, when the swallows had flown inland above the pines of Viareggio, and Shelley’s favourite little Aziola was hooting silverly among the hollow vales of Carrara, the two poets prepared to leave what the frailer of them called “this perch of Pisa.”

But with all its charm and happy associations, the little city was dull.  “Even human faces divine are quite rococo with me,” Mrs. Browning wrote to a friend.  The change to Florence was a welcome one to both.  Browning had already been there, but to his wife it was as the fulfilment of a dream.  They did not at first go to that romantic old palace which will be for ever sociate with the author of “Casa Guidi Windows,” but found accommodation in a more central locality.

When the June heats came, husband and wife both declared for Ancona, the picturesque little town which dreams out upon the Adriatic.  But though so close to the sea, Ancona is in summer time almost insufferably hot.  Instead of finding it cooler than Florence, it was as though they had leapt right into a cauldron.  Alluding to it months later, Mrs. Browning wrote to Horne, “The heat was just the fiercest fire of your imagination, and I seethe to think of it at this distance.”

It was a memorable journey all the same.  They went to Ravenna, and at four o’clock one morning stood by Dante’s tomb, moved deeply by the pathetic inscription and by all the associations it evoked.  All along the coast from Ravenna to Loretto was new ground to both, and endlessly fascinating; in the passing and repassing of the Apennines they had ‘wonderful visions of beauty and glory.’  At Ancona itself, notwithstanding the heat, they spent a happy season.  Here Browning wrote one of the loveliest of his short poems, “The Guardian Angel,” which had its origin in Guercino’s picture in