And there the English reader is at fault. He cannot call Italy his own in any genuine sense; much as his yearnings may go out towards her, in days when his own ungenial climate is wrapping the hedge-rows and hill-farms in mist and driving sleet, much as he may long for a moment after her sun and warmth, her transparent skies and sleepy seas, yet he knows his home is here. Even when he finds himself among her vines, when the lizards dart powdered with green jewels from stone to stone, and the dust puffs up white in the road beside the bay, he finds himself murmuring in his heart Mr. Browning's own words. Oh! to be in England now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England sees some morning unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough-- In England now! That is what he really feels; and however much he loves to think as a picture of the poet and poetess transplanted into the warm lands, his heart does not go out to them, as it would have done had they stayed at home. And so it comes to pass that some of the lines into which Mrs. Browning threw her most passionate emphasis, "Casa Guidi Windows," the words that burn with an alien patriotism--alien, but sunk so deep, that her disappointed hopes made havoc of her life--reach him like murmuring music over water, sweet but fantastic--touching the ear a little and the heart a little, but bringing neither glow nor tears. They say that the Treaty of Villa Franca snapped the cord; that the bitter disappointment of what had become a passion rather than a dream broke the struggling spirit. It may be so--"With her golden verse linking Italy to England," wrote the grateful Florentines upon her monument. But England to Italy? No--"Italy," she wrote herself, "is one thing, England one." We feel that she passed into a strange land, and in its sweetness somewhat forgot her own: the heart is more with her when she writes: I saw Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog Involve the passive city, strangle it Alive, and draw it off into the void, Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge Had wiped out London. Or: A ripple of land: such little hills, the sky Can stoop to tenderly, and the wheatfields climb. Such nooks of valleys lined by orchises, Fed full of noises by invisible streams And open pastures, where you scarcely tell White daisies from white dew--at intervals The mythic oaks and elm trees standing out Self-poised upon their prodigy of shade; I thought my father's land was worthy too Of being Shakespeare's. II