poet should I suppose. And let us speak the truth above all things. I
am strongly a creature of association, and the associations of the place
have not been personally favourable to me. Among the rest, my child, the
light of my eyes, has been more unwell than I ever saw him. . . .
The pleasantest days in Rome we have spent with the Kembles, the two
sisters, who are charming and excellent both of them, in different ways,
and certainly they have given us some excellent hours in the Campagna,
upon picnic excursions--they, and certain of their friends; for
instance, M. Ampere, the member of the French Institute, who is witty
and agreeable, M. Goltz, the Austrian minister, who is an agreeable
man, and Mr. Lyons, the son of Sir Edmund, &c. The talk was almost too
brilliant for the sentiment of the scenery, but it harmonized entirely
with the mayonnaise and champagne. . . .'


It must have been on one of the excursions here described that an
incident took place, which Mr. Browning relates with characteristic
comments in a letter to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald, of July 15, 1882. The picnic
party had strolled away to some distant spot. Mrs. Browning was not
strong enough to join them, and her husband, as a matter of course,
stayed with her; which act of consideration prompted Mrs. Kemble to
exclaim that he was the only man she had ever known who behaved like a
Christian to his wife. She was, when he wrote this letter, reading his
works for the first time, and had expressed admiration for them; but, he
continued, none of the kind things she said to him on that subject could
move him as did those words in the Campagna. Mrs. Kemble would have
modified her statement in later years, for the sake of one English and
one American husband now closely related to her. Even then, perhaps, she
did not make it without inward reserve. But she will forgive me, I am
sure, for having repeated it.