d the Bust" of which I
have said something in chapter XIX, and the "Old Pictures in Florence,"
that philosophic commentary on Vasari, which ends with the spirited
appeal for the crowning of Giotto's Campanile with the addition of
the golden spire that its builder intended--

Fine as the beak of a young beccaccia
The campanile, the Duomo's fit ally,
Shall soar up in gold full fifty braccia,
Completing Florence, as Florence Italy.

But I suppose that the monologues "Andrea del Sarto" and "Fra Lippo
Lippi" would be considered the finest fruit of Browning's Florentine
sojourn, as "Casa Guidi Windows" is of Mrs. Browning's. Her great poem
is indeed as passionate a plea for Italian liberty as anything by an
Italian poet. Here also she wrote much if not all of "Aurora Leigh,"
"The Poems before Congress," and those other Italian political pieces
which when her husband collected them as "Last Poems" he dedicated
"to 'grateful Florence'".

In these Casa Guidi rooms the happiest days of both lives were
spent, and many a time have the walls resounded to the great voice,
laughing, praising or condemning, of Walter Savage Landor; while the
shy Hawthorne has talked here too. Casa Guidi lodged not only the
Brownings, but, at one time, Lowell, who was not, however, a very
good Florentine. "As for pictures," I find him writing, in 1874,
on a later visit, "I am tired to death of 'em,... and then most of
them are so bad. I like best the earlier ones, that say so much in
their half-unconscious prattle, and talk nature to me instead of
high art." But "the older streets," he says, "have a noble mediaeval
distance and reserve for me--a frown I was going to call it, not
of hostility, but of haughty doubt. These grim palace fronts meet
you with an aristocratic start that puts you to the proof of your
credentials. There is to me something wholesome in that that makes
you feel your place."

The Brownings are the two English poets who first spring to mind
in connexion with Florence; but they had had very illustrious
predecessors. In August and September, 1638, during the reign
of Ferdinand II, John Milton was here, and again in the spring of
1639. He read Latin poems to fellow-scholars in the city and received
complimentary sonnets in reply. Here he met Galileo, and from here
he made the excursion to Vallombrosa which gave him some of his most
famous lines. He also learned enough of the language to write love
poetry t