a born virtuoso in whatever he undertook, abhorring a neglected bill as he did an easy rhyme, and all other symbols of that slovenly Bohemia which came nearest, on the whole, to his conception of absolute evil.  They lived at first in much seclusion, seeking no society, and unknown alike to the Italian and the English quarters of the Florentine world.  But Arcady was, at bottom, just as foreign to their ways as Bohemia.  “Soundless and stirless hermits,” Mrs Browning playfully called them; but in no house in Florence did the news of political and literary Europe find keener comment or response than in this quiet hermitage.  Two long absences, moreover (1851-52 and 1855-56), divided between London and Paris, interrupted their Italian sojourn; and these times were crowded with friendly intercourse, which they keenly enjoyed.  “No place like Paris for living in,” Browning declared after returning from its blaze to the quiet retreat of Casa Guidi.  But both felt no less deeply the charm of their “dream life” within these old tapestried walls.[31] Nor did either, in spite of their delight in French poetry and their vivid interest in French politics, really enter the French world.  They were received by George Sand, whose “indiscreet immortalities” had ravished Elizabeth Barrett in her invalid chamber years before; but though she “felt the burning soul through all that quietness,” and through the “crowds of ill-bred men who adore her a genoux bas, betwixt a puff of smoke and an ejection of saliva,”—­they both felt that she did not care for them.  Dumas, another admiration, they did not see; an introduction to Hugo, Browning carried about for years but had no chance of presenting; Beranger they saw in the street, and regretted the absence of an intermediator.  Balzac, to their grief, was just dead.  A complete set of his works was one of their Florentine ambitions.  One memorable intimacy was formed, however, during the Paris winter of 1851-52; for it was now that he first met Joseph Milsand, his warm friend until Milsand’s death in 1886, and probably, for the last twenty years at least, the most beloved of all his friends, as he was at all times one of his shrewdest yet kindliest critics.  Their summer visits to London (1851, 1852, 1855, 1856) brought them much more of intimate personal converse, tempered, however, inevitably, in a yet greater proportion, by pain, discomfort, and fatigue.  Of himself, yet more than of the Laureate, might have been used the phrase in which he was to dedicate a later poem to Tennyson—­“noble and sincere in friendship.”  The visitors who gathered about him in these London visits included friends who belonged to every phase and aspect of his career—­from his old master and mentor, Fox, and Kenyon, the first begetter of his wedded happiness, to Dante Rossetti, his first and, for years to come, solitary disciple, and William Allingham, whom Rossetti introduced.  Among his own contemporaries they were especially intimate with Tennyson,—­the sterling and masculine “Alfred” of Carlyle, whom the world first learnt to know from his biography; and with Carlyle himself, a more genial and kindly Carlyle than most others had the gift of evoking, and whom his biographers mostly efface.