Their chosen abode was not a castle in the Apennines or an old crumbling house by the southern sea, but an apartment commanding the crowded streets of Florence; and their principal absences from it were spent in Rome, in London, or in the yet more congenial "blaze of Paris." They delighted certainly to escape into the forest uplands.

"Robert and I go out and lose ourselves in the woods and mountains, and sit by the waterfalls on the starry and moonlit nights," she wrote from their high perch above Lucca in 1849; but their adventures in this kind were on the whole like the noon-disport of the amphibian swimmer in _Fifine_,--they always admitted of an easy retreat to the _terra firma_ of civilisation,-- "Land the solid and safe To welcome again (confess!) When, high and dry, we chafe The body, and don the dress." The Nature Browning knew and loved was well within sight of humanity, and it was commonly brought nearer by some intrusive vestiges of man's work; the crescent moon drifting in the purple twilight, or "lamping" between the cypresses, is seen over Fiesole or Samminiato; the "Alpine gorge" above Lucca has its ruined chapel and its mill; the Roman Campagna has its tombs--"Rome's ghost since her decease"; the Etrurian hill--fastnesses have their crowning cities "crowded with culture." He had always had an alert eye for the elements of human suggestion in landscape.

But his rendering of landscape before the Italian period was habitually that of a brilliant, graphic, but not deeply interested artist, wielding an incisive pencil and an opulent brush, fastening upon every bit of individual detail, and sometimes, as in the admirable _Englishman in Italy_, recalling Wordsworth's indignant reproof of the great fellow-artist--Scott--who "made an inventory of Nature's charms." This hard objective brilliance does not altogether disappear from the work of his Italian period.

But it tends to give way to a strangely subtle interpenetration of the visible scene with the passion of the seeing soul.

Nature is not more alive, but her life thrills and palpitates in subtler relation with the life of man.