intimacy was formed, however, during the Paris winter of 1851-52; for it
was now that he first met Joseph Milsand, his warm friend until
Milsand's death in 1886, and probably, for the last twenty years at
least, the most beloved of all his friends, as he was at all times one
of his shrewdest yet kindliest critics. Their summer visits to London
(1851, 1852, 1855, 1856) brought them much more of intimate personal
converse, tempered, however, inevitably, in a yet greater proportion, by
pain, discomfort, and fatigue. Of himself, yet more than of the
Laureate, might have been used the phrase in which he was to dedicate a
later poem to Tennyson--"noble and sincere in friendship." The visitors
who gathered about him in these London visits included friends who
belonged to every phase and aspect of his career--from his old master
and mentor, Fox, and Kenyon, the first begetter of his wedded happiness,
to Dante Rossetti, his first and, for years to come, solitary disciple,
and William Allingham, whom Rossetti introduced. Among his own
contemporaries they were especially intimate with Tennyson,--the
sterling and masculine "Alfred" of Carlyle, whom the world first learnt
to know from his biography; and with Carlyle himself, a more genial and
kindly Carlyle than most others had the gift of evoking, and whom his
biographers mostly efface.

[Footnote 31: _Letters of E.B.B._, ii. 199.]

After their return from the second journey to the north their Italian
life lost much of its dream-like seclusion. The publication of _Men and
Women_ (1855) and _Aurora Leigh_ (1856) drew new visitors to the salon
in Casa Guidi, and after 1853 they repeatedly wintered in Rome, mingling
freely in its more cosmopolitan society, and, on occasion, in the
gaieties of the Carnival. To the end, however, their Roman circle was
more American than English. "Is Mr Browning an American?" asked an
English lady of the American ambassador. "Is it possible that you ask me
that?" came the prompt and crushing retort; "why, there is not a village
in the United States so small that they could not tell you that Robert
Browning is an Englishman, and they wish he were an American."
Spiritualism, in the main an American institution, became during the
later years a centre of fervid interest to the one and an irritant to
the other. One turns gladly from that episode to their noble and helpful
friendship for a magnificent old dying lion, with whom, as every one
else discovered,