at Siena; Prinsep now introduced him to some of the by-ways of popular life in Rome.  Together they witnessed the rivalry of two improvisatori poetic gamecocks, whose efforts were stimulated by the announcement that a great poet from England was present; together they listened to the forbidden Hymn to Garibaldi played in Gigi’s osteria, witnessed the dignified blindness of the Papal gendarmes to the offence, while Gigi liberally plied them with drink; and together, to relieve the host of all fear of more revolutionary airs, they took carriages with their musicians and drove to see the Coliseum by moonlight.[78]

The project of a joint volume of poems on the Italian question by Browning and his wife, which had made considerable progress towards realisation, had been dropped after Villafranca, when Browning destroyed his poem; but Mrs Browning had advanced alone and was now revising proofs of her slender contribution to the poetry of politics, Poems before Congress. She wrote them, she says, simply to deliver her soul—­“to get the relief to my conscience and heart, which comes from a pent-up word spoken or a tear shed.”  She can hardly have anticipated that they would be popular in England; but she was not prepared for one poem which denounced American slavery being misinterpreted into a curse pronounced upon England.  “Robert was furious” against the offending Review, she says; “I never saw him so enraged about a criticism;” but by-and-by he “didn’t care a straw.”  His wife, on the other hand, was more deeply pained by the blindness and deafness of the British public towards her husband’s genius; nobody “except a small knot of pre-Rafaelite men” did him justice; his publisher’s returns were a proof of this not to be gainsaid—­not one copy of his poems had for six months been sold, while in America he was already a power.  For the poetry of political enthusiasm he had certainly no vocation.  When Savoy was surrendered to France Mrs Browning suffered some pain lest her Emperor’s generosity might seem compromised.  Browning admitted that the liberation of Italy was a great action, adding cynically of his future Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, “But he has taken eighteen-pence for it, which is a pity.”  During the winter he wrote much.  “Robert deserves no reproaches,” his wife tells her friend Miss Haworth in May, “for he has been writing a good deal this winter—­working at a long poem, which I have not seen a line of, and producing short lyrics which I have seen, and may declare worthy of him.”  Mr F.G.  Kenyon conjectures that the long poem is not unlikely to have been Mr Sludge the Medium, for Home’s performances, as he says, were at this time rampant.[79] As hitherto, both husband and wife showed their poems each to the other only when the poems were complete; thus like a pair of hardy friends they maintained their independence.  Even when they read, there was no reading aloud; Mrs Browning was indefatigable in her passion for books; her husband, with muscular energy impatient for action, found it impossible to read for long at a single sitting.