The first person seen on Italian soil when Browning and his wife disembarked at Leghorn was the brilliant and erratic Irish priest, "Father Prout" of _Fraser's Magazine_, who befriended them with good spirits and a potion of eggs and port wine when Browning was ill in Florence, and chided Mrs Browning as a "bambina" for her needless fears.

Charles Lever "with the sunniest of faces and cordialest of manners"-- animal spirits preponderating a little too much over an energetic intellect--called on them at the Baths of Lucca, but the acquaintance did not ripen into friendship.

And little Miss Boyle, one of the family of the Earls of Cork, would come at night, at the hour of chestnuts and mulled wine, to sparkle as vivaciously as the pine-log that warmed her feet.

These, with the Hoppners, known to Shelley and Byron, a French sculptress of royalist sympathies, Mlle.

de Fauveau, much admired by Browning, and one of the grandsons of Goethe, who flits into and out of the scene, were a compensation for the repulsiveness of certain English folk at Florence who gathered together only for the frivolities, and worse than frivolities, of foreign wayfaring.
In March 1849 joy and sorrow met and mingled in the lives of Browning and his wife.