wax candles when we have used only
two." The pair wandered over the enchanting shores of all the Naples
region, lingered in Sorrento, drove over the picturesque road to Amalfi,
and listened to the song of the sirens along the shore. Their arrival in
Rome was Browning's first sight of the Eternal City. Here Mr. Browning
found an old friend, the Contessa Carducci, with whom the two passed most
of their evenings. He made his poetic pilgrimage to the graves of Shelley
and Keats, as do all later pilgrims, and he visited the grotto of Egeria
in memory of Byron. He loitered in the old _chiesa_ near Santa Maria
Maggiore, where the sixteenth century Bishop "ordered his tomb," and he
visited Trelawney in Leghorn. There exists little record of this trip save
in the poem "The Englishman in Italy," and his return to England through
Germany is alike unrecorded.

Six years had passed since the publication of "The Seraphim and Other
Poems," and on Mr. Browning's arrival at home again, he found two new
volumes of Miss Barrett's, entitled simply "Poems," in which were "A Drama
of Exile," "Bertha in the Lane," "Catarina to Camoens," "A Vision of
Poets," nearly all of the sonnets that she ever wrote save that immortal
sequence, "Sonnets from the Portuguese," and "Lady Geraldine's Courtship."
These volumes absolutely established her poetic rank with that of Tennyson
and Browning. She "heard the nations praising her far off." While she had
many expressions of grateful gladness for all this chorus of praise with
hardly a dissenting voice, the verdict did not affect her own high
standards. "I have written these poems as well as I could," she says, "and
I hope to write others better. I have not reached my own ideal ... but I
love poetry more than I love my own successes in it."

Her love of absolute truth, and the absence of any petty self-love in her
character, stand out in any study of her life. "Why, if you had told me
that my books were without any value in your eyes, do you imagine that I
should not have valued you, reverenced you ever after for your truth, so
sacred a thing in friendship?" she writes to a friend.

The reviews are eminently appreciative and satisfying. _Blackwood's_ gave
a long critique in a special article, frankly pointing out faults, but
asserting that her merits far outweighed her defects, and that her genius
"was profound, unsullied, and without a flaw." The long poem, "A Drama of
Exile" was pronounced the least suc