her pleasure was great: "At Pisa we say, 'How beautiful!' here we say
nothing; it is enough if we can breathe." They had hoped for summer
wanderings in Northern Italy; but Florence held them throughout the year
except for a few days during which they attempted in vain to find a
shelter from the heat among the pines of Vallombrosa. Provided with a
letter of recommendation to the abbot they set forth from their rooms at
early morning by vettura and from Pelago onwards, while Browning rode,
Mrs Browning and Wilson in basket sledges were slowly drawn towards the
monastery by white bullocks. A new abbot, a little holy man with a red
face, had been recently installed, who announced that in his nostrils "a
petticoat stank." Yet in the charity of his heart he extended the three
days ordinarily permitted to visitors in the House of Strangers to five;
during which period beef and oil, malodorous bread and wine and passages
from the "Life of San Gualberto" were vouchsafed to heretics of both
sexes; the mountains and the pinewoods in their solemn dialect spoke
comfortable words.

"Rolling or sliding down the precipitous path" they returned to Florence
in a morning glory, very merry, says Mrs Browning, for disappointed
people. Shelter from the glare of August being desirable, a suite of
comparatively cool rooms in the Palazzo Guidi were taken; they were
furnished in good taste, and opened upon a terrace--"a sort of balcony
terrace which ... swims over with moonlight in the evenings." From Casa
Guidi windows--and before long Mrs Browning was occupied with the first
part of her poem--something of the life of Italy at a moment of peculiar
interest could be observed. Europe in the years 1847 and 1848 was like a
sea broken by wave after wave of Revolutionary passion. Browning and his
wife were ardently liberal in their political feeling; but there were
differences in the colours of their respective creeds and sentiments;
Mrs Browning gave away her imagination to popular movements; she was