Meantime, growing into a tempestuous love for the wild Welsh country, he bargains for a great estate, far up in a valley which opens down upon the larger valley in which lies Abergavenny; and being rich now by reason of his father’s death, parts with his beautiful ancestral properties in the Warwickshire region, lavishing a large portion of the sales-money upon the savagery of the new estate in Wales. He plants, he builds, he plays the monarch in those solitudes. He marries, too, while this mountain passion is on him, a young girl of French or Swiss extraction--led like a lamb into the lion’s grasp. But the first Welsh quarrel of this poet-monarch--who was severely classic, and who fed himself all his life through on the thunder-bolts of Jupiter--was with his neighbors; next with his workmen; then with his tenants; then the magistrates; last with everybody; and in a passion of disgust, he throws down his walls, turns astray his cattle, lets loose his mountain tarns, and leaving behind him the weltering wreck of his half-built home, goes over with his wife to Jersey, off the coast of Normandy. There she, poor, tired, frighted, worried bird--maybe with a little of the falcon in her--would stay; _he_ would not. So he dashes on incontinently--deserting her, and planting himself in mid-France at the old city of Tours, where he devotes himself to study. This first family tiff, however, gets its healing, and--his wife joining him--they go to Como, where Southey (1817) paid them a visit; this poet had been one of the first and few admirers of _Gebir_, which fact softened the way to very much of mutual and somewhat over-strained praises between these two.[48] From Como Landor went to Pisa--afterward to Florence, his home thenceforth for very many years; first in the town proper and then in a villa at Fiesole from which is seen that wondrous view--none can forget who have beheld it--of the valley, which seems a plain--of the nestling city, with its great Brunelleschi dome, its arrow-straight belfry of Giotto, its quaint tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, its cypress sentinels on the Boboli heights, its River Arno shining and winding, and stealing away seaward from the amphitheatre of hills--on whose slopes are dotted white convents, sleeping in the sun, and villas peeping out from their cloakings of verdure, and the gray shimmer of olive orchards. _Landor in Italy._ It was in Florence that Landor wrote the greater part of those _Imaginary Conversations_ which have given him his chief fame; but which, very possibly, may be outlived in the popular mind by the wonderful finish and the Saxon force which belong to many of his verselets.