The weeks at Siena of the year 1850 were not quite so prosperous. During that summer Mrs Browning had been seriously ill. When sufficiently recovered she was carried by her husband to a villa in the midst of vines and olives, a mile and a half or two miles outside Siena, which commanded a noble prospect of hills and plain. At first she could only remain seated in the easy-chair which he found for her in the city. For a day there was much alarm on behalf of the boy, now able to run about, who lay with heavy head and glassy eyes in a half-stupor; but presently he was astir again, and his "singing voice" was heard in the house and garden. Mrs Browning in the fresh yet warm September air regained her strength. Before returning to Florence, they spent a week in the city to see the churches and the pictures by Sodoma. Even little Wiedemann screamed for church-interiors and developed remarkable imitative pietisms of a theatrical kind. "It was as well," said Browning, "to have the eyeteeth and the Puseyistical crisis over together." This comment, although no more than a passing word spoken in play, gives a correct indication of Browning's feeling, fully shared in by his wife, towards the religious movement in England which was altering the face of the established Church. "Puseyism" was for them a kind of child's play which unfortunately had religion for its play-ground; they viewed it with a superior smile, in which there was more of pity than of anger. Both of them, though one was a writer for the stage and the other could read _Madame Bovary_ without flinching and approved the morals of _La Dame aux Camélias_, had their roots in English Puritanism.[46] And now the time had come when Browning was to embody some of his Puritan thoughts and feelings relating to religion in a highly original poem. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 40: "Why am I a Liberal?" Edited by Andrew Reid. London, 1885.] [Footnote 41: Letters of E.B.B., i. 442.] [Footnote 42: To Miss Mitford, August 24, 1848.] [Footnote 43: Casa Guidi Windows, i.] [Footnote 44: "Jane Eyre" was lent to E.B.B. by Mrs Story.] [Footnote 45: _To Miss Mitford, Feb. 18, 1850._] [Footnote 46: In January 1859, Pen was reading an Italian translation of _Monte Cristo_, and announced, to his father's and mother's amusement, that after Dumas he would proceed to "papa's favourite book, _Madame Bovary_".] Chapter VII Christmas Eve and Easter Day