elice's church, we caught a glimpse of the feather of a
note to E.B.B. How near we were to the loss of it, to be sure!"

Happier still must have been the quiet evenings in late spring and
summer, when, the one shrouded against possible chills, the other
bare-headed and with loosened coat, walked slowly to and fro in the
dark, conscious of "a busy human sense" below, but solitary on their
balcony beyond the lamplit room.

"While in and out the terrace-plants, and round
One branch of tall datura, waxed and waned
The lamp-fly lured there, wanting the white flower."

An American friend has put on record his impressions of the two poets,
and their home at this time. He had been called upon by Browning, and by
him invited to take tea at Casa Guidi the same evening. There the
visitor saw, "seated at the tea-table of the great room of the palace in
which they were living, a very small, very slight woman, with very long
curls drooping forward, almost across the eyes, hanging to the bosom,
and quite concealing the pale, small face, from which the piercing
inquiring eyes looked out sensitively at the stranger. Rising from her
chair, she put out cordially the thin white hand of an invalid, and in
a few moments they were pleasantly chatting, while the husband strode up
and down the room, joining in the conversation with a vigour, humour,
eagerness, and affluence of curious lore which, with his trenchant
thought and subtle sympathy, make him one of the most charming and
inspiring of companions."

In the autumn the same friend, joined by one or two other acquaintances,
went with the Brownings to Vallombrosa for a couple of days, greatly to
Mrs. Browning's delight, for whom the name had had a peculiar
fascination ever since she had first encountered it in Milton.

She was conveyed up the steep way towards the monastery in a great
basket, without wheels, drawn by two oxen: though, as she tells Miss
Mitford, she did not get into the monastery after all, she and her maid
being turned away by the monks "for the sin of womanhood." She was too
much of an invalid to climb the steeper heights, but loved to lie under
the great chestnuts upon the hill-slopes near the convent. At twilight
they went to the little convent-chapel, and there Browning sat down at
the organ and played some of those older melodies he loved so well.

It is, strangely enough, from Americans that we have the best account of
the Brownings in their lif