interest in French politics, really enter the French world. They were
received by George Sand, whose "indiscreet immortalities" had ravished
Elizabeth Barrett in her invalid chamber years before; but though she
"felt the burning soul through all that quietness," and through the
"crowds of ill-bred men who adore her _à genoux bas_, betwixt a puff of
smoke and an ejection of saliva,"--they both felt that she did not care
for them. Dumas, another admiration, they did not see; an introduction
to Hugo, Browning carried about for years but had no chance of
presenting; Béranger they saw in the street, and regretted the absence
of an intermediator. Balzac, to their grief, was just dead. A complete
set of his works was one of their Florentine ambitions. One memorable
intimacy was formed, however, during the Paris winter of 1851-52; for it
was now that he first met Joseph Milsand, his warm friend until
Milsand's death in 1886, and probably, for the last twenty years at
least, the most beloved of all his friends, as he was at all times one
of his shrewdest yet kindliest critics. Their summer visits to London
(1851, 1852, 1855, 1856) brought them much more of intimate personal
converse, tempered, however, inevitably, in a yet greater proportion, by
pain, discomfort, and fatigue. Of himself, yet more than of the
Laureate, might have been used the phrase in which he was to dedicate a
later poem to Tennyson--"noble and sincere in friendship." The visitors
who gathered about him in these London visits included friends who
belonged to every phase and aspect of his career--from his old master
and mentor, Fox, and Kenyon, the first begetter of his wedded happiness,
to Dante Rossetti, his first and, for years to come, solitary disciple,
and William Allingham, whom Rossetti introduced. Among his own
contemporaries they were especially intimate with Tennyson,--the
sterling and masculine "Alfred" of Carlyle, whom the world first learnt
to know from his biography; and with Carlyle himself, a more genial and
kindly Carlyle than most others had the gift of evoking, and whom his