I intimated a moment ago that their honeymoon continued for two years.
This was a mistake, for it continued for just fifteen years, when the
beautiful girl-like form, with her head of flowing curls upon her
husband's shoulder, ceased to breathe. Painlessly and without apprehension
or premonition, the spirit had taken its flight.

That letter of Miss Blagdon's, written some weeks after, telling of how
the stricken man paced the echoing hallways at night crying, "I want her!
I want her!" touches us like a great, strange sorrow that once pierced our
hearts.

But Robert Browning's nature was too strong to be subdued by grief. He
remembered that others, too, had buried their dead, and that sorrow had
been man's portion since the world began. He would live for his boy--for
Her child.

But Florence was no longer his Florence, and he made haste to settle up
his affairs and go back to England. He never returned to Florence, and
never saw the beautiful monument, designed by his lifelong friend,
Frederick Leighton.

When you visit the little English Cemetery at Florence, the slim little
girl that comes down the path, swinging the big bunch of keys, opens the
high iron gate and leads you, without word or question, straight to the
grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Browning was forty-nine when Mrs. Browning died.

And by the time he had reached his fiftieth meridian, England, harkening
to America's suggestion, was awakening to the fact that he was one of the