biographers mostly efface.

[Footnote 31: _Letters of E.B.B._, ii. 199.]

After their return from the second journey to the north their Italian
life lost much of its dream-like seclusion. The publication of _Men and
Women_ (1855) and _Aurora Leigh_ (1856) drew new visitors to the salon
in Casa Guidi, and after 1853 they repeatedly wintered in Rome, mingling
freely in its more cosmopolitan society, and, on occasion, in the
gaieties of the Carnival. To the end, however, their Roman circle was
more American than English. "Is Mr Browning an American?" asked an
English lady of the American ambassador. "Is it possible that you ask me
that?" came the prompt and crushing retort; "why, there is not a village
in the United States so small that they could not tell you that Robert
Browning is an Englishman, and they wish he were an American."
Spiritualism, in the main an American institution, became during the
later years a centre of fervid interest to the one and an irritant to
the other. One turns gladly from that episode to their noble and helpful
friendship for a magnificent old dying lion, with whom, as every one
else discovered, it was ill to play--Walter Savage Landor. Here it was
the wife who looked on with critical though kindly sarcasm at what she
thought her husband's generous excess of confidence. Of all these
intimacies and relationships, however, the poetry of these years
discloses hardly a glimpse. His actual dealings with men and women
called out all his genial energies of heart and brain, but--with one
momentous exception--they did not touch his imagination.


III.