Better even than these, for happy dwelling upon, is the poem the two poets lived.  Morning and day were full of work, study, or that pleasurable idleness which for the artist is so often his best inspiration.  Here, on the little terrace, they used to sit together, or walk slowly to and fro, in conversation that was only less eloquent than silence.  Here one day they received a letter from Horne.  There is nothing of particular note in Mrs. Browning’s reply, and yet there are not a few of her poems we would miss rather than these chance words—­delicate outlines left for the reader to fill in:  “We were reading your letter, together, on our little terrace—­walking up and down reading it—­I mean the letter to Robert—­and then, at the end, suddenly turning, lo, just at the edge of the stones, just between the balustrades, and already fluttering in a breath of wind and about to fly away over San Felice’s church, we caught a glimpse of the feather of a note to E.B.B.  How near we were to the loss of it, to be sure!”

Happier still must have been the quiet evenings in late spring and summer, when, the one shrouded against possible chills, the other bare-headed and with loosened coat, walked slowly to and fro in the dark, conscious of “a busy human sense” below, but solitary on their balcony beyond the lamplit room.

     “While in and out the terrace-plants, and round
      One branch of tall datura, waxed and waned
      The lamp-fly lured there, wanting the white flower.”

An American friend has put on record his impressions of the two poets, and their home at this time.  He had been called upon by Browning, and by him invited to take tea at Casa Guidi the same evening.  There the visitor saw, “seated at the tea-table of the great room of the palace in which they were living, a very small, very slight woman, with very long curls drooping forward, almost across the eyes, hanging to the bosom, and quite concealing the pale, small face, from which the piercing inquiring eyes looked out sensitively at the stranger.  Rising from her chair, she put out cordially the thin white hand of an invalid, and in a few moments they were pleasantly chatting, while the husband strode up and down the room, joining in the conversation with a vigour, humour, eagerness, and affluence of curious lore which, with his trenchant thought and subtle sympathy, make him one of the most charming and inspiring of companions.”

In the autumn the same friend, joined by one or two other acquaintances, went with the Brownings to Vallombrosa for a couple of days, greatly to Mrs. Browning’s delight, for whom the name had had a peculiar fascination ever since she had first encountered it in Milton.

She was conveyed up the steep way towards the monastery in a great basket, without wheels, drawn by two oxen:  though, as she tells Miss Mitford, she did not get into the monastery after all, she and her maid being turned away by the monks “for the sin of womanhood.”  She was too much of an invalid to climb the steeper heights, but loved to lie under the great chestnuts upon the hill-slopes near the convent.  At twilight they went to the little convent-chapel, and there Browning sat down at the organ and played some of those older melodies he loved so well.