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.
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.