There were poetsByron and Shelley, the Brownings, Swinburne and Meredithwho were filled with a passionate devotion to the Italian cause.

For fifteen years the Brownings lived an ideally happy life at Pisa, and at Casa Guidi, Florence, sharing the same poetical ambitions.

The gap occasioned by the death of these early English poets of the century was now to be filled in large measure by Tennyson, though among the writers of song to arise were the Brownings, Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, and Swinburne.

It was to the monastery at Vallombrosa that the Brownings travelled in 1848 when Mrs. Browning was ill.

Casa Guidi lodged not only the Brownings, but, at one time, Lowell, who was not, however, a very good Florentine.

" The Brownings are the two English poets who first spring to mind in connexion with Florence; but they had had very illustrious predecessors.

But next the Brownings it is Walter Savage Landor of whom I always think as the greatest English Florentine.

Shelley, Landor, the Brownings, all gave the cause of Italy great and, in one case, the most exquisite verse, while the conflict was uncertain still.

For nearly fifteen years Florence and the Brownings have been one in the thoughts of many English and Americans; and Casa Guidi, which has been immortalized by Mrs. Browning's genius, will be as dear to the Anglo-Saxon traveller as Milton's Florentine residence has been heretofore.

Association with the Brownings, even though of the slightest nature, made one better in mind and soul.

Our winter in Paris had been greatly brightened by the acquaintance of the Brownings, the father and sister of the poet.

The intrusion even of a friend was too much for this catastrophe, and we saw little more of the Brownings until years after, when other and many changes of fortune had come over us, and we met again in Italy.

Love affair of the Brownings.

Love affair of the Brownings.

I say?the Brownings made of it.

Here Mrs. Jameson, Powers, and Greenough, and the Brownings and Storys, were her warm friends.

" Many of the closing years of the sculptor's long life were spent in Rome, where she had a wide circle of eminent American and English friends, among whom were Hawthorne, Thackeray, George Eliot, and the Brownings.

George S. Hillard, in his Six Months in Italy, when he visited the Brownings the year after their marriage, says, "A happier home and a more perfect union than theirs it is not easy to imagine; and this completeness arises not only from the rare qualities which each possesses, but from their perfect adaptation to each other.... Nor is she more remarkable for genius and learning, than for sweetness of temper and purity of spirit.

American literature is now thoroughly out of leading-strings; and the nation which supplied the first appreciative audience for Carlyle, Tennyson, and the Brownings, can certainly trust its own literary instincts to create the new words it needs.

Doctor Hautayne read beautiful things from the Brownings at Miss Pennington's that evening; it was his turn to provide; but for us,we looked into new depths in Leslie's serene, clear, woman eyes, and we felt the intenser something in his face and voice, and the wonder was that everybody could not see how quite another thing than any merely written poetry was really "next" that night for Leslie and for John Hautayne.

Of course this old friendship paved the way for a new one when the Brownings came to live in Florence.

Very many of such of these fragmentary scribblings, as were written before the Brownings left Florence, contain some word or reference to her beloved "Ba," for such was the pet name used between them, with what meaning or origin I know not.