Frederick Tennyson, the Laureate's brother, and himself a true poet in his degree, "a dreamy, shy, speculative man," simple withal and truthful, had married an Italian wife and was settled for a time in Florence.

To him Browning became attached with genuine affection.

Mrs Browning was a student of the writings of Swedenborg, and she tells much of her new friend in a single Swedenborgian word--"selfhood, the _proprium_, is not in him." Frederick Tennyson, though left in a state of bewilderment by Browning's poetry, found the writer of the poetry "a man of infinite learning, jest and bonhommie, and moreover a sterling heart that reverbs no hollowness."[53] Another intimate who charmed them much was one of the attaches of the English embassy, and a poet of unquestionable faculty, very young, very gentle and refined, delicate and excitable, full of sensibility, "full of all sorts of goodness and nobleness," but somewhat dreamy and unpractical, "visionary enough," writes Mrs Browning, "to suit me," interested moreover in spiritualism, which suited her well, "never," she unwisely prophesied, "to be a great diplomatist." It was hardly, Mr Kenyon, the editor of her letters, observes, a successful horoscope of the destiny of Lord Lytton, the future Ambassador at Paris and Viceroy of India.[54] Early in 1853 Mrs Browning became much interested in the reports which reached her--many of these from America--of the "rapping spirits," who in the 'fifties were busy in instructing chairs and tables to walk in the way they should not go.

"You know I am rather a visionary," she wrote to Miss Mitford, "and inclined to knock round at all the doors of the present world to try to get out." Her Swedenborgian studies had prepared her to believe that there were communities of life in the visible and the invisible worlds which did not permit of the one being wholly estranged from the other.

A clever person who loves the marvellous will soon find by the sheer force of logic that marvels are the most natural things in the world.