were to survive to the day of Macaulay's New Zealander, the contemporaries of that meditative traveller would have sufficient to enable them to understand the great fame of the poet of "dim ancestral days", as the more acute among them could discern something of the real Shelley, though time had preserved but the three lines -- "Yet now despair itself is mild, Even as the winds and waters are; I could lie down like a tired child" . . . something of the real Catullus, through the mists of remote antiquity, if there had not perished the single passionate cry -- "Lesbia illa, Illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam Plus quam se, atque suos amavit omnes!" At the beginning of July (1858), the Brownings left Florence for the summer and autumn, and by easy stages travelled to Normandy. Here the invalid benefited considerably at first: and here, I may add, Browning wrote his `Legend of Pornic', `Gold Hair'. This poem of twenty-seven five-line stanzas (which differs only from that in more recent "Collected Works", and "Selections", in its lack of the three stanzas now numbered 21, 22, and 23) was printed for limited private circulation, though primarily for the purpose of securing American copyright. Browning several times printed single poems thus, and for the same reasons -- that is, either for transatlantic copyright, or when the verses were not likely to be included in any volume for a prolonged period. These leaflets or half-sheetlets of `Gold Hair' and `Prospice', of `Cleon' and `The Statue and the Bust' -- together with the `Two Poems by Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning', published, for benefit of a charity, in 1854 -- are among the rarest "finds" for the collector, and are literally worth a good deal more than their weight in gold. In the tumultuous year of 1859 all Italy was in a ferment. No patriot among the Nationalists was more ardent in her hopes than the delicate, too fragile, dying poetess, whose flame of life burned anew with the great hopes that animated her for her adopted country. Well indeed did she deserve, among the lines which the poet Tommaseo wrote and the Florence municipality caused to be engraved in gold upon a white marble slab, to be placed upon Casa Guidi, the words `fece del suo verso aureo anello fra Italia e Inghilterra' -- "who of her Verse made a golden link connecting England and Italy." The victories of Solferino and San Martino made the bitterness of the disgraceful Treaty of Villafranca the more hard to bear. Even had we not Mr. Story's evidence, it would be a natural conclusion that this disastrous ending to the high hopes of the Italian patriots accelerated Mrs. Browning's death. The withdrawal of hope is often worse in its physical effects than any direct bodily ill.