"As to Italian society," wrote Mrs Browning, "one may as well take to longing for the evening star, for it seems quite inaccessible." But the name of Elizabeth Barrett, if not yet that of Robert Browning, was a sufficient introduction to cultivated Englishmen and Americans who had made Florence their home.

Among the earliest of these acquaintances were the American sculptor Powers, Swedenborgian and spiritualist (a simple and genial man, "with eyes like a wild Indian's, so black and full of light"), and Hillard, the American lawyer, who, in his _Six months in Italy_, described Browning's conversation as "like the poetry of Chaucer," meaning perhaps that it was hearty, fresh, and vigorous, "or like his own poetry simplified and made transparent." "It seems impossible," Hillard goes on, "to think that he can ever grow old." And of Mrs Browning: "I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit.

She is a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl." A third American friend was one who could bring tidings of Emerson and Hawthorne--Margaret Fuller of "The Dial," now Countess d'Ossoli, "far better than her writings," says Mrs Browning, "...

not only exalted but _exaltee_ in her opinions, yet calm in manner." Her loss, with that of her husband, on their voyage to America deeply affected Mrs Browning.

"Was she happy in anything ?" asks her sorrowing friend.