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] Casa Guidi proper, the Casa Guidi which held the books and pictures and furniture and graceful knick-knacks chosen by its occupants, who were lovers of beauty, dates only from 1848.

Previously they had been satisfied with a furnished apartment.