Mr. Hillard speaks of the happiness of the Brownings’ home and their union as perfect:  he, full of manly power, she, the type of the most sensitive and delicate womanhood.  This much-esteemed friend was fascinated by Mrs. Browning.  Again and again he alludes to her exceeding spirituality:  “She is a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl:”  her frame “the transparent veil for a celestial and mortal spirit:”  and those fine words which prove that he too was of the brotherhood of the poets, “Her tremulous voice often flutters over her words like the flame of a dying candle over the wick.”

CHAPTER VIII.

With the flower-tide of spring in 1849 came a new happiness to the two poets:  the son who was born on the 9th of March.  The boy was called Robert Wiedemann Barrett, the second name, in remembrance of Browning’s much-loved mother, having been substituted for the “Sarianna” wherewith the child, if a girl, was to have been christened.  Thereafter their “own young Florentine” was an endless joy and pride to both:  and he was doubly loved by his father for his having brought a renewal of life to her who bore him.

That autumn they went to the country, to the neighbourhood of Vallombrosa, and then to the Bagni di Lucca.  There they wandered content in chestnut-forests, and gathered grapes at the vintage.

Early in the year Browning’s “Poetical Works” were published in two volumes.  Some of the most beautiful of his shorter poems are to be found therein.  What a new note is struck throughout, what range of subject there is!  Among them all, are there any more treasurable than two of the simplest, “Home Thoughts from Abroad” and “Night and Morning”?

     “Oh, to be in England
      Now that April’s there,
      And whoever wakes in England
      Sees, some morning, unaware,
      That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
      Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
      While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
      In England—­now!

      And after April, when May follows,
      And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! 
      Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
      Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
      Blossoms and dewdrops—­at the bent spray’s edge—­
      That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
      Lest you should think he never could recapture
      The first fine careless rapture!”

A more significant note is struck in “Meeting at Night” and “Parting at
Morning.”

MEETING.

I.

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

II.