[Footnote 31:  Letters of E.B.B., ii. 199.]

After their return from the second journey to the north their Italian life lost much of its dream-like seclusion.  The publication of Men and Women (1855) and Aurora Leigh (1856) drew new visitors to the salon in Casa Guidi, and after 1853 they repeatedly wintered in Rome, mingling freely in its more cosmopolitan society, and, on occasion, in the gaieties of the Carnival.  To the end, however, their Roman circle was more American than English.  “Is Mr Browning an American?” asked an English lady of the American ambassador.  “Is it possible that you ask me that?” came the prompt and crushing retort; “why, there is not a village in the United States so small that they could not tell you that Robert Browning is an Englishman, and they wish he were an American.”  Spiritualism, in the main an American institution, became during the later years a centre of fervid interest to the one and an irritant to the other.  One turns gladly from that episode to their noble and helpful friendship for a magnificent old dying lion, with whom, as every one else discovered, it was ill to play—­Walter Savage Landor.  Here it was the wife who looked on with critical though kindly sarcasm at what she thought her husband’s generous excess of confidence.  Of all these intimacies and relationships, however, the poetry of these years discloses hardly a glimpse.  His actual dealings with men and women called out all his genial energies of heart and brain, but—­with one momentous exception—­they did not touch his imagination.

III.

Almost as faint as these echoes of personal friendship are those of the absorbing public interest of these years, the long agony, fitfully relieved by spells of desperate and untimely hope, of the Italian struggle for liberty.  The Brownings arrived in Florence during the lull which preceded the great outbreak of 1848.  From the historic “windows of Casa Guidi” they looked forth upon the gentle futilities of the Tuscan revolution, the nine days’ fight for Milan, the heroic adventure of Savoy, and the apparently final collapse of all these high endeavours on the field of Novara.  Ten years of petty despotism on the one side, of “a unanimity of despair” on the other, followed; and then the monotonous tragedy seemed to break suddenly into romance, as the Emperor, “deep and cold,” marched his armies over the Alps for the Deliverance of Italy.

Of all this the Brownings were deeply moved spectators.  Browning shared his wife’s sympathy with the Italians and her abhorrence of Austria, and it is not likely that he uttered either sentiment with less vivacity and emphasis, though much less of his talk is on record. “’How long, O Lord, how long!’ Robert kept saying.”  But he had not her passionate admiration for France, still less her faith in the President-Emperor.  His less lyric temperament did not so readily harbour unqualified