On the anniversary of their wedding day Browning and his wife saw from their window a brilliant procession of grateful and enthusiastic Florentines stream into the _Piazza_. Pitti with banners and _vivas_ for the space of three hours and a half It was the time when the Grand Duke was a patriot and Pio Nono was a liberal. The new helmets and epaulettes of the civic guard proclaimed the glories of genuine freedom. The pleasure of the populace was like that of children, and perhaps it had some serious feeling behind it. The incomparable Grand Duke had granted a liberal constitution, and was led back from the opera to the Pitti by the torchlights of a cheering crowd--"through the dark night a flock of stars seemed sweeping up the piazza." A few months later, and the word of Mrs Browning is "Ah, poor Italy"; the people are attractive, delightful, but they want conscience and self reverence.[42] Browning and she painfully felt that they grew cooler and cooler on the subject of Italian patriotism. A revolution had been promised, but a shower of rain fell and the revolution was postponed. Now it was the Grand Duke _out_, and the bells rang, and a tree of liberty was planted close to the door of Casa Guidi; six weeks later it was the Grand Duke _in_, and the same bells rang, and the tree of liberty was pulled down. The Pope is well-meaning but weak; and before long honorific epithets have to be denied him--he is merely a Pope; his prestige and power over souls is lost. The liberal Grand Duke is transformed into a Duke decorated with Austrian titles. As for France, Mrs Browning had long since learnt from the books she read with so much delight to feel a debt to the country of Balzac and George Sand. She thought that the unrest and the eager hopes of the French Revolution, notwithstanding its errors, indicated at least the conception of a higher ideal than any known to the English people. Browning did not possess an equal confidence in France; he did not accept her view that the French occupation of Rome was capable of justification; nor did he enter into her growing hero-worship--as yet far from its full development--of Louis Napoleon. Her admiration for Balzac he shared, and it is probable that the death of the great novelist moved him to keener regret than did the death, at no considerable distance of time, of Wordsworth. With French communism or socialism neither husband nor wife, however republican in their faith, had sympathy; they held that its tendency is to diminish the influence of the individual, and that in the end the progress of the mass is dependent on the starting forth from the mass and the striding forward of individual minds. They believed as firmly as did Edmund Burke in the importance of what Burke styles a natural aristocracy.