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126 Dickens said." Mr. Browning, in a note attached to his wife's letter, says, "She is getting better every day—stronger, better wonderfully, and beyond all our hopes."

The newly-married pair spent the winter in Pisa, at the Collegio Ferdinando, in a street terminated by the palace in which Cosmo the Great, Horne's hero, slew his son. The change was in every way beneficial for our poetess, a change, as she told an American correspondent in the beginning of 1847, "from the long seclusion in one room to liberty and Italy's sunshine; for a resigned life I take up a happy one." Apologising for a lengthy silence, she adds:—

"I shall behave better, you will find, for the future, and more gratefully, and I begin some four months after the greatest event of my life by telling you that I am well and happy, and meaning to get as strong in the body by the help of this divine climate as I am in the spirit—the spirits! So much has God granted me compensation. Do you not see already that it was not altogether the sight of the free sky which made me fail to you before. . . . My husband's name will prove to you that I have not left my vocation to the rhyming art in order to marry; on the contrary, we mean, both of us, to do a great deal of work, besides surprising the world by the spectacle of two poets coming together without quarrelling, wrangling, and calling names in lyrical measures. . . . We live here in the most secluded manner, eschewing English visitors and reading Vasari, and dreaming dreams of seeing Venice in the summer. Until the beginning of April we are tied to this perch of Pisa, as the climate is recommended for the weakness of my chest, and the repose and calmness of the place are