the chapel at Fano.  By the allusions in the sixth and eighth stanzas it is clear that the poem was inscribed to Alfred Domett, the poet’s well-loved friend immortalised as “Waring.”  Doubtless it was written for no other reason than the urgency of song, for in it are the loving allusions to his wife, “my angel with me too,” and “my love is here.”  Three times they went to the chapel, he tells us in the seventh stanza, to drink in to their souls’ content the beauty of “dear Guercino’s” picture.  Browning has rarely uttered the purely personal note of his inner life.  It is this that affords a peculiar value to “The Guardian Angel,” over and above its technical beauty.  In the concluding lines of the stanzas I am about to quote he gives the supreme expression to what was his deepest faith, his profoundest song-motive.

“I would not look up thither past thy head
Because the door opes, like that child, I know,
For I should have thy gracious face instead,
Thou bird of God!  And wilt thou bend me low
Like him, and lay, like his, my hands together,
And lift them up to pray, and gently tether
Me, as thy lamb there, with thy garment’s spread?

* * * * *

“How soon all worldly wrong would be repaired! 
I think how I should view the earth and skies
And sea, when once again my brow was bared
After thy healing, with such different eyes. 
O world, as God has made it!  All is beauty: 
And knowing this, is love, and love is duty. 
What further may be sought for or declared?”

After the Adriatic coast was left, they hesitated as to returning to Florence, the doctors having laid such stress on the climatic suitability of Pisa for Mrs. Browning.  But she felt so sure of herself in her new strength that it was decided to adventure upon at least one winter in the queen-city.  They were fortunate in obtaining a residence in the old palace called Casa Guidi, in the Via Maggiore, over against the church of San Felice, and here, with a few brief intervals, they lived till death separated them.

On the little terrace outside there was more noble verse fashioned in the artist’s creative silence than we can ever be aware of:  but what a sacred place it must ever be for the lover of poetry!  There, one ominous sultry eve, Browning, brooding over the story of a bygone Roman crime, foreshadowed “The Ring and the Book,” and there, in the many years he dwelt in Casa Guidi, he wrote some of his finer shorter poems.  There, also, “Aurora Leigh” was born, and many a lyric fresh with the dew of genius.  Who has not looked at the old sunworn house and failed to think of that night when each square window of San Felice was aglow with festival lights, and when the summer lightnings fell silently in broad flame from cloud to cloud:  or has failed to hear, down the narrow street, a little child go singing, ’neath Casa Guidi windows by the church, O bella liberta, O bella!