And Venice in May and early June did indeed for a time make amends.

"I have been between heaven and earth," Mrs.Browning wrote, "since our arrival at Venice." The rich architecture, the colour, the moonlight, the music, the enchanting silence made up a unity of pleasures like nothing that she had previously known.

When evening came she and her husband would follow the opera from their box hired for "two shillings and eightpence English," or sit under the moon in the piazza of St Mark sipping coffee and reading the French papers.

But as the month went by, Browning lost appetite and lost sleep.

The "soothing, lulling, rocking atmosphere" which suited Mrs.Browning made him, after the first excitement of delight, grow nervous and dispirited.