y to be above all other earthly interests; he
was a poet by nature and by grace, and his vast range of scholarship, his
"British-Museum-Library memory," and his artistic feeling and taste, all
conserved to this one end. But poetry to him was not outside, but
inclusive of the very fullest human life. Mrs. Browning's lines,

"... No perfect artist is developed here
From any imperfect woman,..."

embodied his convictions as well, for man and woman alike. He had that
royal gift of life in its fullness, an almost boundless capacity of
enjoyment, and to him life meant the completest development and exercise
of all its powers.

The Brownings found their Florentine circle all in evidence. Mr. Lytton, a
favorite and familiar visitor at Casa Guidi; Frederick Tennyson (and
perhaps his "forty fiddlers" as well), and the Trollopes, Isa Blagden, and
various wandering minstrels. They passed evenings with Mr. Lytton in his
villa, and would walk home "to the song of nightingales by starlight and
firefly light." To Mrs. Browning Florence looked more beautiful than ever
after Rome. "I love the very stones of it," she said. Limitations of
finance kept them in Florence all that summer. "A ship was to have brought
us in something, and brought us in nothing," she explained to a friend in
England, "and the nothing had a discount, beside." But she took comfort in
the fact that Penini was quite as well and almost as rosy as ever, despite
the intense heat; and the starlight and the song of the nightingales were
not without consolation. A letter from Milsand ("one of the noblest and
most intellectual men," says Mrs. Browning of him) came, and they were
interested in his arraignment of the paralysis of imagination in
literature. In September she hears from Miss Mitford of her failing
health, and tenderly writes: "May the divine love in the face of our Lord
Jesus Christ shine upon you day and night, with His ineffable tenderness."
Mrs. Browning's religious feeling was always of that perfect reliance on
the Divine Love that is the practical support of life. "For my own part,"
she continues, "I have been long convinced that what we call death is a
mere incident in life.... I believe that the body of flesh is a mere husk
that drops off at death, while the spiritual body emerges in glorious
resurrection at once. Swedenborg says some people do not immediately
realize that they have passed death, which seems to me highly probable. It
is curiou