l,
the abbot of the monastery having someway confounded their pleadings with
the temptation of St. Anthony, as something to be as heroically resisted.
They set up their household gods in the shades of the Via delle Belle
Donne, near the Duomo, where dinners, "unordered," Mrs. Browning said,
"come through the streets, and spread themselves on our table, as hot as
if we had smelt cutlets hours before." She found Florence "unspeakably
beautiful," both by grace of nature and of art, but they planned to go to
Rome in the early autumn, taking an apartment "over the Tarpeian rock."
Later this plan was relinquished, and with an apartment on their hands for
six months they yet abandoned it, for want of sunshine, and removed to
Casa Guidi.

"Think what we have done," wrote Mrs. Browning to Miss Mitford; "taken
two houses, that is, two apartments, each for six months, pre-signing
the contract. You will set it down to excellent poet's work in the way
of domestic economy, but the fault was altogether mine, for my
husband, to please me, took rooms with which I was not pleased for
three days, through the absence of sunshine. The consequence was that
we had to pay heaps of guineas away, for leave to go, ourselves, but
you can scarcely fancy the wonderful difference which the sun makes in
Italy. So away we came into the blaze of him into the Piazza Pitti;
precisely opposite the Grand Duke's palace; I with my remorse, and
poor Robert without a single reproach. Any other man, a little lower
than the angels, would have stamped and sworn a little for the mere
relief of the thing,--but as for his being angry with me for any cause
except not eating enough dinner, the said sun would turn the wrong way
first."

Mrs. Browning's dog, Flush, was a member of the household not to be
ignored, and her one source of consolation, in being turned away from the
Vallombrosa summer, lay in the fact that "Flush hated it," and was
frightened by the vast and somber pine forests. "Flush likes civilized
life," said Mrs. Browning laughingly, "and the society of little dogs
with turned-up tails, such as abound in Florence."

So now they bestowed themselves in "rooms yellow with sunshine from
morning till night," in Casa Guidi, where, "for good omen," they looked
down on the old gray church of San Felice. There was a large, square
anteroom, where the piano was placed, with one large picture, picked up