When Savoy was surrendered to France Mrs Browning suffered some pain lest her Emperor's generosity might seem compromised.

Browning admitted that the liberation of Italy was a great action, adding cynically of his future Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, "But he has taken eighteen-pence for it, which is a pity." During the winter he wrote much.

"Robert deserves no reproaches," his wife tells her friend Miss Haworth in May, "for he has been writing a good deal this winter--working at a long poem, which I have not seen a line of, and producing short lyrics which I have seen, and may declare worthy of him." Mr F.G.Kenyon conjectures that the long poem is not unlikely to have been _Mr Sludge the Medium_, for Home's performances, as he says, were at this time rampant.[79] As hitherto, both husband and wife showed their poems each to the other only when the poems were complete; thus like a pair of hardy friends they maintained their independence.

Even when they read, there was no reading aloud; Mrs Browning was indefatigable in her passion for books; her husband, with muscular energy impatient for action, found it impossible to read for long at a single sitting.
On June 4th 1860 they left Rome, travelling by vettura through Orvieto and Chiusi to their home in Florence.[80] The journey fatigued Mrs Browning, but on arriving they had the happiness of finding Landor well; he looked not less than magnificent, displaying "the most beautiful sea-foam of a beard ...

all in a curl and white bubblement of beauty." Wilson had the old man under happy control; only once had he thrown his dinner out of the window; that he should be at odds with all the world was inevitable, and that all the world should be in the wrong was exhilarating and restorative.