Of the last scene no other account need be asked or wished for than that given by Mr. Browning himself in a letter to Miss Haworth, dated July 20, 1861.[105]

My dear Friend,—­I well know you feel, as you say, for her once and for me now.  Isa Blagden, perfect in all kindness to me, will have told you something, perhaps, and one day I shall see you and be able to tell you myself as much as I can.  The main comfort is that she suffered very little pain, none beside that ordinarily attending the simple attacks of cold and cough she was subject to, had no presentiment of the result whatever, and was consequently spared the misery of knowing she was about to leave us:  she was smilingly assuring me that she was ‘better,’ ‘quite comfortable, if I would but come to bed,’ to within a few minutes of the last.  I think I foreboded evil at Rome, certainly from the beginning of the week’s illness, but when I reasoned about it, there was no justifying fear.  She said on the last evening ’It is merely the old attack, not so severe a one as that of two years ago; there is no doubt I shall soon recover,’ and we talked over plans for the summer and next year.  I sent the servants away and her maid to bed, so little reason for disquietude did there seem.  Through the night she slept heavily and brokenly—­that was the bad sign; but then she would sit up, take her medicine, say unrepeatable things to me, and sleep again.  At four o’clock there were symptoms that alarmed me; I called the maid and sent for the doctor.  She smiled as I proposed to bathe her feet, ’Well, you are determined to make an exaggerated case of it!’ Then came what my heart will keep till I see her again and longer—­the most perfect expression of her love to me within my whole knowledge of her.  Always smilingly, happily, and with a face like a girl’s, and in a few minutes she died in my arms, her head on my cheek.  These incidents so sustain me that I tell them to her beloved ones as their right:  there was no lingering, nor acute pain, nor consciousness of separation, but God took her to Himself as you would lift a sleeping child from a dark uneasy bed into your arms and the light.  Thank God!  Annunziata thought, by her earnest ways with me, happy and smiling as they were, that she must have been aware of our parting’s approach, but she was quite conscious, had words at command, and yet did not even speak of Peni, who was in the next room.  The last word was, when I asked, ’How do you feel?’ ’Beautiful.’...

So ended on earth the most perfect example of wedded happiness in the history of literature—­perfect in the inner life and perfect in its poetical expression.  It was on June 29, 1861, that Mrs. Browning died.  She was buried at Florence, where her body rests in a sarcophagus designed by her friend and her husband’s friend, Frederic Leighton, the future President of the Royal Academy.  At a later date, when her husband was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, her remains