These and a few American visitors are all we have seen at Florence.  We live a far more solitary life than you do, in your village and with the ‘prestige’ of the country wrapping you round.  Pray give your sympathies to our Pope, and call him a great man.  For liberty to spring from a throne is wonderful, but from a papal throne is miraculous.  That’s my doxy.  I suppose dear Mr. Kenyon and Mr. Chorley are still abroad.  French books I get at, but at scarcely a new one, which is very provoking.  At Rome it may be better.  I have not read ‘Martin’ even, since the first volume in England, nor G. Sand’s ‘Lucretia.’

May God bless you.  Think sometimes of your ever affectionate

E.B.B.

[Footnote 167:  In Tennyson’s Princess.]

[Footnote 168:  A picture of the same scene in verse will be found in Casa Guidi Windows, part i.: 

  ’Shall I say
  What made my heart beat with exulting love
  A few weeks back,’ &c.]

The ‘month’ lengthened itself out, and December found the Brownings still in Florence, and definitely established there for the winter.  During this time, although there is no allusion to it in the letters, Mrs. Browning must have been engaged in writing the first part of ‘Casa Guidi Windows’ with its hopeful aspirations for Italian liberty.  It was, indeed, a time when hope seemed justifiable.  Pius IX. had ascended the papal throne—­then a temporal as well as a spiritual sovereignty—­in June 1846, with the reputation of being anxious to introduce liberal reforms, and even to promote the formation of a united Italy.  The English Government was diplomatically advocating reform, in spite of the opposition of Austria; and its representative, Lord Minto, who was sent on a special mission to Italy to bring this influence to bear on the rulers of the various Italian States, was received with enthusiastic joy by the zealots for Italian liberty.  The Grand Duke of Tuscany, as was noticed above, had taken the first step in the direction of popular government by the institution of a National Guard; and Charles Albert of Piedmont was always supposed to have the cause of Italy at heart in spite of the vacillations of his policy.  The catastrophe of 1848 was still in the distance; and for the moment a friend of freedom and of Italy might be permitted to hope much.

Yet a difference will be noticed between the tone of Mrs. Browning’s letters at this time and that which marks her language in 1859.  In 1847 she was still comparatively new to the country.  She is interested in the experiment which she sees enacted before her; she feels, as any poet must feel, the attraction of the idea of a free and united Italy.  But her heart is not thrown into the struggle as it was at a later time.  She can write, and does, for the most part, write, of other matters.  The disappointment of Milan and Novara could not break her heart, as the disappointment of Villafranca went near to doing.  They are not, indeed, so much as mentioned in detail in the letters that follow.  It is in ’Casa Guidi Windows’—­the first part written in 1847-8, the second in 1851—­that her reflections upon Italian politics, alike in their hopes and in their failures, must be sought.