letters--was, like many others, in which we recognise rare and precious
quality, singularly wanting in obviously expressive traits. It is
possible to describe everything that went on in the Browning household
in terms applicable to those of scores of other persons of wide
interests, cultivated tastes, and moderate but not painfully restricted
means. All that was passionate, ideal, heroic in them found expression
through conditions which it needs a fine eye to distinguish from those
of easy-going bourgeois mediocrity. Their large and catholic humanity
exempted them from much that makes for bold and sensational outline in
the story of a career. Their poetic home was built upon all the
philistine virtues. Mrs Jameson laughed at their "miraculous prudence
and economy"; and Mrs Browning herself laughed, a little, at her
husband's punctilious rigour in paying his debts,--his "horror of owing
five shillings for five days"; Browning, a born virtuoso in whatever he
undertook, abhorring a neglected bill as he did an easy rhyme, and all
other symbols of that slovenly Bohemia which came nearest, on the whole,
to his conception of absolute evil. They lived at first in much
seclusion, seeking no society, and unknown alike to the Italian and the
English quarters of the Florentine world. But Arcady was, at bottom,
just as foreign to their ways as Bohemia. "Soundless and stirless
hermits," Mrs Browning playfully called them; but in no house in
Florence did the news of political and literary Europe find keener
comment or response than in this quiet hermitage. Two long absences,
moreover (1851-52 and 1855-56), divided between London and Paris,
interrupted their Italian sojourn; and these times were crowded with
friendly intercourse, which they keenly enjoyed. "No place like Paris
for living in," Browning declared after returning from its blaze to the
quiet retreat of Casa Guidi. But both felt no less deeply the charm of
their "dream life" within these old tapestried walls.[31] Nor did
either, in spite of their delight in French poetry and their vivid