Before the end of October they were on their way to Florence.

"The Brownings are long gone back now," wrote Dante Rossetti in December, "and with them one of my delights--an evening resort where I never felt unhappy.

How large a part of the real world, I wonder, are those two small people ?--taking meanwhile so little room in any railway carriage and hardly needing a double bed at the inn." The great event of the autumn for the Brownings and for the lovers of English poetry was the publication of _Aurora Leigh_.

Its popularity was instantaneous; within a fortnight a second edition was called for; there was no time to alter even a comma.

"That golden-hearted Robert," writes Mrs Browning, "is in ecstasies about it--far more than if it all related to a book of his own." The volume was dedicated to John Kenyon; but before the year was at an end Kenyon was dead.