or some old palazzo, with a pointed cypress to guard it, by the opaque
blue breadth of summer sea, the joy in mountain and sea is subtly
reinforced at every point by the play of human interest; there are
frescoes on the crumbling walls, and a barefooted girl tumbles melons on
the pavement with news that the king has been shot at; art and politics
asserting their place beside Nature in the heart of Italy's "old lover."
And in the actual life of the Brownings "Nature" had to be content, as a
rule, with the humbler share. Their chosen abode was not a castle in the
Apennines or an old crumbling house by the southern sea, but an
apartment commanding the crowded streets of Florence; and their
principal absences from it were spent in Rome, in London, or in the yet
more congenial "blaze of Paris." They delighted certainly to escape into
the forest uplands. "Robert and I go out and lose ourselves in the woods
and mountains, and sit by the waterfalls on the starry and moonlit
nights," she wrote from their high perch above Lucca in 1849; but their
adventures in this kind were on the whole like the noon-disport of the
amphibian swimmer in _Fifine_,--they always admitted of an easy retreat
to the _terra firma_ of civilisation,--

"Land the solid and safe
To welcome again (confess!)
When, high and dry, we chafe
The body, and don the dress."

The Nature Browning knew and loved was well within sight of humanity,
and it was commonly brought nearer by some intrusive vestiges of man's
work; the crescent moon drifting in the purple twilight, or "lamping"
between the cypresses, is seen over Fiesole or Samminiato; the "Alpine
gorge" above Lucca has its ruined chapel and its mill; the Roman