Page:Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Ingram, 5th ed.).djvu/145

Rh the latter city for Ancona, in order to be cooler, and found that they were "leaping right into the cauldron. The heat was just the fiercest fire of your imagination, and I seethe to think of it at this distance. But we saw the whole coasts, from Ravenna to Loretto, and had wonderful visions of beauty and glory in passing and re-passing the Apennines. At Ravenna we stood one morning, at four, at Dante's tomb, with its pathetic inscription, and seldom has any such sight so moved me. Ravenna is a dreary, marshy place, with a dead weight of melancholy air fading the faces of its inhabitants; and its pine-forest stands off too far to redeem it anywise."

Florence grew to be a second, home and a domestic shrine to Mrs. Browning. Her first impressions of it were pleasant, and the pleasure became permanent. Writing from the Tuscan capital to Horne, she says:— "Here we live for nothing, or next to nothing, and have great rooms, and tables and chairs thrown in; and although hearing occasionally that Florence is to be sacked on such a day, and our Grand Duke deposed on such another, I have learnt to endure meekly all such expectations, and to hold myself as safe as you in your garden through them all. One thing is certain—that the Italians won't spoil their best surtouts by venturing out in a shower of rain through whatever burst of revolutionary ardour, nor will they forget to take their ices through loading of their guns."

And later on she says: "All I complain of at Florence is the difficulty of getting sight of new books, which I, who have been used to a new 'sea-serpent' every morning, in the shape of a French romance, care still more for than my husband does. Old books