otions his spirits and
to some extent his health gave way. He could not think of returning to
his father's home without extreme pain--"It would break his heart," he
said, "to see his mother's roses over the wall, and the place where she
used to lay her scissors and gloves." He longed that his father and
sister should quit the home of sorrow, and hasten to Florence; but this
was not to be. As for England, it could not be thought of as much on his
wife's account as his own. Her father held no communication with her;
supplicating letters remained unnoticed; her brothers were temporarily
estranged. Her sister Henrietta had left her former home; having
"insulted" her father by asking his consent to her marriage with Captain
Surtees Cook, she had taken the matter into her own hands; the deed was
done, and the name of his second undutiful daughter--married to a person
of moderate means and odiously "Tractarian views"--was never again to be
mentioned in Mr Barrett's presence. England had become for Mrs Browning
a place of painful memories, and a centre of present strife which she
did not feel herself as yet able to encounter.

The love of wandering, however, when successive summers came, and
Florence was ablaze with sunshine, grew irresistible, and drove Browning
and his household to seek elsewhere for fresh interests or for coolness
and repose. In 1848, beguiled by the guide-book, they visited Fano to
find it quivering with heat, "the very air swooning in the sun." Their
reward at Fano was that picture by Guercino of the guardian angel
teaching a child to pray, the thought of which Browning has translated
into song:

We were at Fano, and three times we went
To sit and see him in his chapel there,
And drink his beauty to our soul's content
--My angel with me too.

Ancona, where the poem was written, if its last line is historically
true, followed Fano, among whose brown rocks, "elbowing out the purple
tides," and brown houses--"an exfoliation of the rock"--they lived for a
week on fish and cold water. The tour included Rimini and Ravenna, with
a return to Florence by Forli and a passage through the Apennines. Next
year--1849--when Pen was a few months old, the drop of gipsy blood in
Browning's veins, to which his wife jestingly refers, tingled but
faintly; it was Mrs Browning's part to compel him, for the baby's sake
and hers, to seek his own good. They visited Spezzia and glanced at the
house of Shelley at