To sit alone And think, for comfort, how that very night Affianced lovers, leaning face to face, With sweet half-listenings for each other's breath Are reading haply from some page of ours To pause with a thrill, as if their cheeks had touched When such a stanza level to their mood Seems floating their own thoughts out--"So I feel For thee"--"And I for thee: this poet knows What everlasting love is." To have our books Appraised by love, associated with love While we sit loveless. Such a heart deserved all the love it could get. The latter years of Mrs. Browning's life have a certain shadowiness for English readers. The "Casa Guidi," if we were not painfully haunted by the English in which interviewers have given their impressions of it, is a memory to linger over. The high dusty passage that gave access to the tall, gloomy house; the huge cool rooms, with little Pennini, so called in contrast to the colossal statue Apennino, "slender, fragile, spirit-like" flitting about from stair to stair: the faint sounds of music breathing about the huge corridors; the scent, the stillness,--such a home as only two poets could create, and two lovers inhabit. Nathaniel Hawthorne gives, among some rather affected writing about a visit of his there, a few characteristic touches. "Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room--a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill yet sweet tenuity of voice. Really I do not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away from him some day when he least thinks of it. She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another figure in the world." "The boy," he says elsewhere, "was born in Florence, and prides himself upon being a Florentine, and is indeed as un-English a production as if he were a native of another planet." This touch perhaps will explain why it is that we rather lose hold of Mrs. Browning after her marriage; England was connected in her mind with all the old trials of life which seemed to have fallen away with her new existence; ill-health, and mental struggle, bereavement and pain--even though it was pain triumphed over. With marriage and Italy a new life began. It became her adopted country-- And now I come, my Italy, My own hills! Are you 'ware of me, my hills, How I burn to you? Do you feel to-night The urgency and yearning of my soul.