ardo, and lingerings in old palaces and galleries, and saunterings
down narrow streets crowded with _contadini_,--these days were as entirely
past as if he had been transported to another planet.

"Not death; we do not call it so,
Yet scarcely more with dying breath
Do we forego;
We pass an unseen line,
And lo! another zone."

The sea and the sands and the sky prefigured themselves in those days to
Browning as all indistinguishably blended in an unreal world, from which
the past had receded and on which the Future had not yet dawned.

"Gray rocks and grayer sea,
And surf along the shore;
And in my heart a name
My lips shall speak no more."

To Story he wrote with assurances of affection, but saying, "I can't speak
about anything. I could, perhaps, if we were together, but to write
freezes me." Miss Blagden, in London, had taken rooms in Upper Westbourne
Terrace, and when in the late autumn Browning and his son went on to
England, he took an apartment in Chichester Road, almost opposite the
house where Miss Blagden was staying. But she had lived too long in
enchanted Florence to be content elsewhere, and she soon returned to her
villa on the heights of Bellosguardo, from which the view is one of the
most beautiful in all Europe. Browning soon took the house, No. 19 Warwick
Crescent, which for nearly all the rest of his life continued to be his
home. Here he was near Mrs. Browning's sister, Arabel Barrett, of whom he
was very fond, and whose love for her sister's little son was most
grateful to them both. Mr. Browning had his old tapestries, pictures, and
furniture of old Florentine carving, some of it black with age, sent on
from Casa Guidi, and he proceeded to transform a prim London house into an
interior of singular charm. He lined the staircase with Italian pictures;
books overflowed in all the rooms, and the glimpse of water in the canal
near reflected the green trees of the Crescent, giving the place a hint of
sylvan Arcadias. There was the grand piano on which Penini practiced, and
a tutor was engaged to prepare the lad for the university. The poet felt
that this was the critical time to give his son "the English stamp," in
"whatever it is good for," he added. But as a matter of fact the young
Florentine had little affinity with English ways. He was the child of
poets; a linguist from his infancy, an omnivorous reader, and with marked
talent for art, distinguishing himself later in bo