A new abbot, a little holy man with a red face, had been recently installed, who announced that in his nostrils "a petticoat stank." Yet in the charity of his heart he extended the three days ordinarily permitted to visitors in the House of Strangers to five; during which period beef and oil, malodorous bread and wine and passages from the "Life of San Gualberto" were vouchsafed to heretics of both sexes; the mountains and the pinewoods in their solemn dialect spoke comfortable words.
"Rolling or sliding down the precipitous path" they returned to Florence in a morning glory, very merry, says Mrs Browning, for disappointed people.

Shelter from the glare of August being desirable, a suite of comparatively cool rooms in the Palazzo Guidi were taken; they were furnished in good taste, and opened upon a terrace--"a sort of balcony terrace which ...

swims over with moonlight in the evenings." From Casa Guidi windows--and before long Mrs Browning was occupied with the first part of her poem--something of the life of Italy at a moment of peculiar interest could be observed.

Europe in the years 1847 and 1848 was like a sea broken by wave after wave of Revolutionary passion.

Browning and his wife were ardently liberal in their political feeling; but there were differences in the colours of their respective creeds and sentiments; Mrs Browning gave away her imagination to popular movements; she was also naturally a hero-worshipper; she hoped more enthusiastically than he was wont to do; she was more readily depressed; the word "liberty" for her had an aureole or a nimbus which glorified all its humbler and more prosaic meanings.