way to
converse." Mrs. Browning had then just been reading the "Blithedale
Romance," in which she had sought unavailingly, it seems, for some more
personal clue to the inner life of its author.

On a brilliant August day the Brownings and the Storys fared forth on a
grand excursion on donkey-back, to Benabbia, a hilltown, perched on one
of the peaks. Above it on the rocks is a colossal cross, traced by some
thunder-bolt of the gods, cut in the solid stone. From this excursion they
all returned after dark, in terror of their lives lest the donkeys slip
down the sheer precipices; but the scenery was "exquisite, past all
beauty." Mrs. Browning was spell-bound with its marvelous sublimity, as
they looked around "on the world of innumerable mountains bound faintly
with the gray sea, and not a human habitation."

Mrs. Browning was then reading the poems of Coventry Patmore, just
published, of which Browning had read the manuscript in London in the
previous year. The poems of Alexander Smith had also appeared at this
time, and in him Mrs. Browning found "an opulence of imagery," but a
defect as to the intellectual part of poetry. With her characteristic
tolerance, she instanced his youth in plea of this defect, and said that
his images were "flowers thrown to him by the gods, gods beautiful and
fragrant, but having no root either in Etna or Olympus." Enamored, as
ever, of novels, she was also reading "Vilette," which she thought a
strong story, though lacking charm, and Mrs. Gaskell's "Ruth," which
pleased her greatly.

With no dread of death, Mrs. Browning had a horror of the "rust of age,"
the touch of age "which is the thickening of the mortal mask between
souls. Why talk of age," she would say, "when we are all young in soul and
heart?... Be sure that it's highly moral to be young as long as possible.
Women who dress 'suitably to their years' (that is, as hideously as
possible) are a disgrace to their sex, aren't they now?" she would
laughingly declare.

This summer in the Apennines at Bagni di Lucca had been a fruitful one to
Browning in his poetic work. It became one of constant development, and,
as Edmund Gosse points out, "of clarification and increasing selection."
He had already written many of his finest lyrics, "Any Wife to Any
Husband," "The Guardian Angel," and "Saul"; and in these and succeeding
months he produced that miracle of beauty, the poem called "The Flight of
the Duchess"; and "A Grammarian's Funer