"She is," he wrote to his publisher, "there as in all else, as high above me as I would have her." It was at Pisa that the highest evidence of his wife's powers as a poet came as an unexpected and wonderful gift to her husband.

In a letter of December 1845--more than a year since--she had confessed that she was idle; and yet "silent" was a better word she thought than "idle." Her apology was that the apostle Paul probably did not work hard at tent-making during the week that followed his hearing of the unspeakable things.

At the close of a letter written on July 22, 1846, she wrote: "You shall see some day at Pisa what I will not show you now.

Does not Solomon say that 'there is a time to read what is written ?' If he doesn't, he ought." The time to read had now come.

"One day, early in 1847," as Mr Gosse records what was told to him by Browning, "their breakfast being over, Mrs Browning went upstairs, while her husband stood at the window watching the street till the table should be cleared.