change of air, although gained at the expense of some weariness, had
done her a world of good.

Early in October the journeying closed at Pisa. Rooms were taken for six
months in the great Collegio Ferdinando, close to the Duomo and the
Leaning Tower, rooms not quite the warmest in aspect. Mrs Jameson
pronounced the invalid not improved but transformed. The repose of the
city, asleep, as Dickens described it, in the sun and the secluded
life--a perpetual _tête-à-tête_, but one so happy--suited both the
wedded friends; days of cloudless weather, following a spell of rain,
went by in "reading and writing and talking of all things in heaven and
earth, and a little besides; and sometimes even laughing as if we had
twenty people to laugh with us, or rather _hadn't_." Their sole
acquaintance was an Italian Professor of the University; for three
months they never looked at a newspaper; then a loophole on the world
was opened each evening by the arrival of the Siècle. The lizards were
silent friends of one poet, and golden oranges gleamed over the walls to
the unaccustomed eyes of the other like sunshine gathered into globes.
They wandered through pine-woods and drove until the purple mountains
seemed not far 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,