Almost as faint as these echoes of personal friendship are those of the
absorbing public interest of these years, the long agony, fitfully
relieved by spells of desperate and untimely hope, of the Italian
struggle for liberty. The Brownings arrived in Florence during the lull
which preceded the great outbreak of 1848. From the historic "windows of
Casa Guidi" they looked forth upon the gentle futilities of the Tuscan
revolution, the nine days' fight for Milan, the heroic adventure of
Savoy, and the apparently final collapse of all these high endeavours on
the field of Novara. Ten years of petty despotism on the one side, of "a
unanimity of despair" on the other, followed; and then the monotonous
tragedy seemed to break suddenly into romance, as the Emperor, "deep and
cold," marched his armies over the Alps for the Deliverance of Italy.

Of all this the Brownings were deeply moved spectators. Browning shared
his wife's sympathy with the Italians and her abhorrence of Austria,
and it is not likely that he uttered either sentiment with less vivacity
and emphasis, though much less of his talk is on record. "'How long, O
Lord, how long!' Robert kept saying." But he had not her passionate
admiration for France, still less her faith in the President-Emperor.
His less lyric temperament did not so readily harbour unqualified
emotion as hers. His judgment of character was cooler, and with all his
proverbial readiness as a poet to provide men of equivocal conduct with
hypothetical backgrounds of lofty or blameless motive, he was in
practice as exempt from amiable illusions as he was from narrow spite.
Himself the most exact and precise in his dealings with the world, he
could pardon the excesses and irregularities of a great nature; but
sordid self-seeking under the mask of high ideals revolted him. He
laughed at the boyish freaks of Lander's magnificent old age, which
irritated even his large-hearted wife; but he could not forgive Louis