For four years--from 1847 to 1851--Browning never crossed the confines of Italy. No duties summoned him away, and he was happy in his home. "We are as happy," he wrote in December 1847, "as two owls in a hole, two toads under a tree-stump; or any other queer two poking creatures that we let live after the fashion of their black hearts, only Ba is fat and rosy; yes indeed." In spring they drove day by day through the Cascine, passing on the way the carven window of the _Statue and the Bust_, and "the stone called Dante's," whereupon He used to bring his quiet chair out, turned To Brunelleschi's church.[43] And after tea there was the bridge of Trinita from which to watch the sunsets turning the Arno to pure gold while the moon and the evening-star hung aloft. It was a life of retirement and of quiet work. Mrs Browning mentions to a friend that for fifteen months she could not make her husband spend a single evening out--"not even to a concert, nor to hear a play of Alfieri's," but what with music and books and writing and talking, she adds, "we scarcely know how the days go, it's such a gallop on the grass." The "writing" included the revision and preparation for the press of Browning's _Poems_, in two volumes, which Chapman & Hall, more liberal than Moxon, had undertaken to publish at their own risk, and which appeared in 1849. Some care and thought were also given by Browning to the alterations of text made in the edition of his wife's Poems of the following year; and for a time his own _Christmas Eve and Easter Day_ was an absorbing occupation. As to the "reading," the chief disadvantage of Florence towards the middle of the last century was the difficulty of seeing new books of interest, whether French or English. Yet _Vanity Fair_ and _The Princess, Jane Eyre_ and _Modern Painters_ somehow found their way to Casa Guidi.[44]