Of himself, yet more than of the Laureate, might have been used the phrase in which he was to dedicate a later poem to Tennyson--"noble and sincere in friendship." The visitors who gathered about him in these London visits included friends who belonged to every phase and aspect of his career--from his old master and mentor, Fox, and Kenyon, the first begetter of his wedded happiness, to Dante Rossetti, his first and, for years to come, solitary disciple, and William Allingham, whom Rossetti introduced.

Among his own contemporaries they were especially intimate with Tennyson,--the sterling and masculine "Alfred" of Carlyle, whom the world first learnt to know from his biography; and with Carlyle himself, a more genial and kindly Carlyle than most others had the gift of evoking, and whom his biographers mostly efface.
[Footnote 31: _Letters of E.B.B._, ii.

199.] After their return from the second journey to the north their Italian life lost much of its dream-like seclusion.

The publication of _Men and Women_ (1855) and _Aurora Leigh_ (1856) drew new visitors to the salon in Casa Guidi, and after 1853 they repeatedly wintered in Rome, mingling freely in its more cosmopolitan society, and, on occasion, in the gaieties of the Carnival.

To the end, however, their Roman circle was more American than English.