off.  At the Lanfranchi Palace they thought of Byron, to see a curl of whose hair or a glove from whose hand, Browning declares (so foolish was he and ignorant) he would have gone farther than to see all Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey condensed in Rosicrucian fashion into a vial.  In the Campo Santo they listened to a musical mass for the dead.  In the Duomo they heard the Friar preach.  And early in the morning their dreams were scattered by the harmonious clangour of the church bells.  “I never was happy before in my life,” wrote Mrs Browning.  Her husband relieved her of all housekeeping anxieties.  At two o’clock came a light dinner—­perhaps thrushes and chianti—­from the trattoria; at six appeared coffee and milk-rolls; at nine, when the pine-fire blazed, roast chestnuts and grapes.  Debts there were none to vex the spirits of these prudent children of genius.  If a poet could not pay his butcher’s and his baker’s bills, Browning’s sympathies were all with the baker and the butcher.  “He would not sleep,” wrote his wife, “if an unpaid bill dragged itself by any chance into another week “; and elsewhere:  “Being descended from the blood of all the Puritans, and educated by the strictest of dissenters, he has a sort of horror about the dreadful fact of owing five shillings five days.”  Perhaps some of this horror arose from the sense of that weight which pecuniary cares hang upon all the more joyous mountings of the mind.  One grief and only one was still present; Mr Barrett remained inexorable; his daughter hoped that with time and patience his arms would open to her again.  It was a hope never to be fulfilled.  In the cordial comradeship of Browning’s sister, Sarianna, a new correspondent, there was a measure of compensation.

Already Browning had in view the collected edition of his Poetical Works which did not appear until 1849.  The poems were to be made so lucid, “that everyone who understood them hitherto” was to “lose that mark of distinction.” Paracelsus and Pippa were to be revised with special care.  The sales reported by Moxon were considered satisfactory; but of course the profits as yet were those of his wife’s poems.  “She is,” he wrote to his publisher, “there as in all else, as high above me as I would have her.”

It was at Pisa that the highest evidence of his wife’s powers as a poet came as an unexpected and wonderful gift to her husband.  In a letter of December 1845—­more than a year since—­she had confessed that she was idle; and yet “silent” was a better word she thought than “idle.”  Her apology was that the apostle Paul probably did not work hard at tent-making during the week that followed his hearing of the unspeakable things.  At the close of a letter written on July 22, 1846, she wrote:  “You shall see some day at Pisa what I will not show you now.  Does not Solomon say that ‘there is a time to read what is written?’ If he doesn’t, he ought.”  The time to read had now come.  “One day, early in