between Switzerland for the summer, or going again to Siena, where they
and the Brownings might be together. The poet had been intending to meet
the Storys at Leghorn that night, but he felt that he could not leave his
wife, though with no prescience of the impending change. She was weak, but
they talked over their summer plans, decided they would soon go to Siena,
and agreed that they would give up Casa Guidi that year, and take a villa
in Florence, instead. They were endeavoring to secure an apartment in
Palazzo Barberini for the winter, the Storys being most anxious that they
should be thus near together, and Mrs. Browning discussed with him the
furnishing of the rooms in case they decided upon the Palazzo. Only that
morning Mr. Lytton had called, and while Mrs. Browning did not see him,
her husband talked with him nearly all the morning. Late in the evening
she seemed a little wandering, but soon she slept, waking again about
four, when they talked together, and she seemed to almost pass into a
state of ecstasy, expressing to him in the most ardent and tender words
her love and her happiness. The glow of the luminous Florentine dawn
brightened in the room, and with the words "It is beautiful!" she passed
into that realm of life and light and loveliness in which she had always
seemed to dwell.

"And half we deemed she needed not
The changing of her sphere,
To give to heaven a Shining One,
Who walked an angel here."

[Illustration: THE ENGLISH CEMETERY, FLORENCE, IN WHICH MRS. BROWNING IS
BURIED.]

Curiously, Miss Blagden had not slept at all that night. After her return
from her visit to Mrs. Browning the previous afternoon, "every trace of
fatigue vanished," she wrote to a friend, "and all my faculties seemed
singularly alert. I was unable to sleep, and sat writing letters till
dawn, when a cabman came to tell me '_La Signora della Casa Guidi e
morte!_'"

The Storys came immediately from Leghorn, and Miss Blagden took Edith
Story and Penini to her villa. It was touching to see his little friend's
endeavor to comfort the motherless boy. Mr. and Mrs. Story stayed with
Browning in the rooms where everything spoke of her presence: the table,
strewn with her letters and books; her little chair, a deep armchair of
dark green velvet, which her son now holds sacred among his treasures, was
drawn by the table just as she had left it, and in her portfolio was a
half-finished letter to Madame Mario, speak