te:[11]

"... I can't say anything now except that he is one of the nicest
people to pass an evening with in London. He is a clear-headed and
particularly clear-eyed man of the world, devoted to society, one of
the greatest diners-out in London, cordial and hearty, shakes your
hand as if he were really glad to see you.... As to his talk it wasn't
'Sordello,' and it wasn't as fine as 'Paracelsus,' but nobody ever
talked more nobly, truly, and cheerily than he. I went home and slept
after hearing him as one does after a fresh starlight walk with a good
cool breeze on his face."

In 1863, on July 19, a little more than two years after the death of Mrs.
Browning, Arabel Barrett had a dream, in which she was speaking with her
sister Elizabeth, and asked, "When shall I be with you?" "Dearest, in five
years," was the reply. She told this dream to Mr. Browning, who recorded
it at the time. In June of 1868 Miss Barrett died, the time lacking one
month only of being the five years. "Only a coincidence, but noticeable,"
Mr. Browning wrote to Isa Blagden. But in the larger knowledge that we now
have of the nature of life and the phenomena of sleep, that the ethereal
body is temporarily released from the physical (sleep being the same as
death, save that in the latter the magnetic cord is severed, and the
separation is final)--in the light of this larger knowledge it is easy to
realize that the two sisters actually met in the ethereal realm, and that
the question was asked and answered according to Miss Barrett's
impression. The event was sudden, its immediate cause being rheumatic
affection of the heart, and she died in Browning's arms, as did his wife.
Her companionship had been a great comfort to him, and Mr. Gosse notes
that for many years after her death he could not bear to pass Delamere
Terrace.

The late summer of that year was devoted to traveling from Cannes about
the coast, and they finally decided on Audierne for a sojourn. "Sarianna
and I have just returned from a four hours' walk," he writes to a friend
from this place; but here, as everywhere, he was haunted by Florentine
memories, and by intense longings for his vanished paradise. To Isa
Blagden he wrote:

"I feel as if I should immensely like to glide along for a summer day
through the streets and between the old stone walls, unseen come and
unheard go,--perhaps by some miracle I shall do so ... Oh, me! to find