his friend Ablett, who had lent
him the money to buy the villa, professing himself wholly happy--

Thou knowest how, and why, are dear to me
My citron groves of Fiesole,
My chirping Affrico, my beechwood nook,
My Naiads, with feet only in the brook,
Which runs away and giggles in their faces;
Yet there they sit, nor sigh for other places--

but later in the year came a serious break. Landor's relations with
Mrs. Landor, never of such a nature as to give any sense of security,
had grown steadily worse as he became more explosive, and they now
reached such a point that he flung out of the house one day and did
not return for many years, completing the action by a poem in which
he took a final (as he thought) farewell of Italy:--

I leave thee, beauteous Italy! No more
From the high terraces, at even-tide,
To look supine into thy depths of sky,
The golden moon between the cliff and me,
Or thy dark spires of fretted cypresses
Bordering the channel of the milky way.
Fiesole and Valdarno must be dreams,
Hereafter, and my own lost Affrico
Murmur to me but the poet's song.

Landor gave his son Arnold the villa, settling a sum on his wife
for the other children's maintenance, and himself returned to Bath,
where he added to his friends Sir William Napier (who first found
a resemblance to a lion in Landor's features), John Forster, who
afterwards wrote his life, and Charles Dickens, who named a child
after him and touched off his merrier turbulent side most charmingly
as Leonard Boythom in "Bleak House". But his most constant companion
was a Pomeranian dog; in dogs indeed he found comfort all his life,
right to the end.

Landor's love of his villa and estate finds expression again and again
in his verse written at this time. The most charming of all these
charming poems--the perfection of the light verse of a serious poet--is
the letter from England to his youngest boy, speculating on his
Italian pursuits. I begin at the passage describing the villa's cat:--

Does Cincirillo follow thee about,
Inverting one swart foot suspensively,
And wagging his dread jaw at every chirp
Of bird above him on the olive-branch?
Frighten him then away! 'twas he who slew
Our pigeons, our white pigeons peacock-tailed,
That feared not you and me--alas, nor him!
I flattened his striped sides along my knee,
And reasoned with him