Mrs. Surtees Cook died in the course of the winter. Mr. Browning always
believed that the shock and sorrow of this event had shortened his
wife's life, though it is also possible that her already lowered
vitality increased the dejection into which it plunged her. Her own
casual allusions to the state of her health had long marked arrested
progress, if not steady decline. We are told, though this may have been
a mistake, that active signs of consumption were apparent in her even
before the illness of 1859, which was in a certain sense the beginning
of the end. She was completely an invalid, as well as entirely a
recluse, during the greater part if not the whole of this last stay in
Rome.

She rallied nevertheless sufficiently to write to Miss Browning in
April, in a tone fully suggestive of normal health and energy.


'. . . In my own opinion he is infinitely handsomer and more attractive
than when I saw him first, sixteen years ago. . . . I believe people in
general would think the same exactly. As to the modelling--well, I told
you that I grudged a little the time from his own particular art. But it
does not do to dishearten him about his modelling. He has given a great
deal of time to anatomy with reference to the expression of form, and
the clay is only the new medium which takes the place of drawing. Also,
Robert is peculiar in his ways of work as a poet. I have struggled a
little with him on this point, for I don't think him right; that is
to say, it would not be right for me . . . But Robert waits for an
inclination, works by fits and starts; he can't do otherwise he says,
and his head is full of ideas which are to come out in clay or marble. I
yearn for the poems, but he leaves that to me for the present. . . . You
will think Robert looking very well when you see him; indeed, you may