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