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1864.] dying beside her. It was no doubt owing to this constant taxation of the brain that her intellect was bat a wreck of its former self daring the last four years of her life. During this time her condition was bat a living death, though she was physically well. She was watched over and cared for with the most unselfish devotion by her son Thomas Adolphus and his wife, who gave up all pleasures away from home to be near their mother. The favorite reading in these last days was her son Anthony's novels.

And Thomas Trollope, writing of his mother's death, says: "Though we have been so long prepared for it, and though my poor dear mother has been in fact dead to us for many months past, and though her life, free from suffering as it was, was such as those who loved her could not have wished prolonged, yet for all this the last separation brings a pang with it She was as good and dear a mother as ever man had; and few sons have passed so large a portion of their lives in such intimate association with their mother as I have for more than thirty years."

This is a noble record for both mother and son. To her children Mrs. Trollope was a providence and support in all time of sorrow or trouble,—a cause of prosperity, a confidant, a friend, and a companion.

A grateful American makes this humble offering to her memory in the name of justice.

There is a villa too, near Florence, "on the link of Bellosguardo," as dear from association as Villino Trollope. It has for a neighbor the Villa Mont' Auto, where Hawthorne lived, and which he transformed by the magic of his pen into the Monte Bene of the "Marble Faun." Not far off is the "tower" wherein Aurora Leigh sought peace,—and found it. The inmate of this villa was a little lady with blue-black hair and sparkling jet eyes, a writer whose dawn is one of promise, a chosen friend of the noblest and best, and on her terrace the Brownings, Walter Savage Landor, and many choice spirits have sipped tea while their eyes drank in such a vision of beauty as Nature and Art have never equalled elsewhere.

No sun could die, nor yet be born, unseen

By dwellers at my villa: morn and eve

Were magnified before us in the pure

Illimitable space and panse of sky,

Intense as angels' garments blanched with God,

Less blue than radiant From the outer wall

Of the garden dropped the mystic floating gray

Of olive-trees, (with interruptions green

From maize and vine,) until 't was caught and torn

On that abrupt line of dark cypresses

Which signed the way to Florence. Beautiful

The city lay along the ample vale,—

Cathedral, tower and palace, piazza and street;

The river trailing like a silver cord

Through all, and curling loosely, both before

And after, over the whole stretch of land,

Sown whitely up and down its opposite slopes

With farms and villas."

What Aurora Leigh saw from her tower is almost a counterpart of what Mrs. Browning gazed upon so often from the terrace of Villa Brichieri.

Florence without the Trollopes and our Lady of Bellosguardo would be like bread without salt. A blessing, then, upon houses which have been spiritual asylums to many forlorn Americans!—a blessing upon their inmates, whose hearts are as large and whose hands are as open as their minds are broad and catholic!