Always together." A grand-daughter of Lord Byron--"very quiet and very intense"-- was among the visitors at the Via del Tritone, and Lady Marion Alford, "very eager about literature and art and Robert," for all which eagernesses Mrs Browning felt bound to care for her.

The artists Burne-Jones and Prinsep had made Browning's acquaintance at Siena; Prinsep now introduced him to some of the by-ways of popular life in Rome.

Together they witnessed the rivalry of two improvisatori poetic gamecocks, whose efforts were stimulated by the announcement that a great poet from England was present; together they listened to the forbidden Hymn to Garibaldi played in Gigi's _osteria_, witnessed the dignified blindness of the Papal gendarmes to the offence, while Gigi liberally plied them with drink; and together, to relieve the host of all fear of more revolutionary airs, they took carriages with their musicians and drove to see the Coliseum by moonlight.[78] The project of a joint volume of poems on the Italian question by Browning and his wife, which had made considerable progress towards realisation, had been dropped after Villafranca, when Browning destroyed his poem; but Mrs Browning had advanced alone and was now revising proofs of her slender contribution to the poetry of politics, _Poems before Congress._ She wrote them, she says, simply to deliver her soul--"to get the relief to my conscience and heart, which comes from a pent-up word spoken or a tear shed." She can hardly have anticipated that they would be popular in England; but she was not prepared for one poem which denounced American slavery being misinterpreted into a curse pronounced upon England.

"Robert was _furious_" against the offending Review, she says; "I never saw him so enraged about a criticism;" but by-and-by he "didn't care a straw." His wife, on the other hand, was more deeply pained by the blindness and deafness of the British public towards her husband's genius; nobody "except a small knot of pre-Rafaelite men" did him justice; his publisher's returns were a proof of this not to be gainsaid--not one copy of his poems had for six months been sold, while in America he was already a power.

For the poetry of political enthusiasm he had certainly no vocation.