The Romantic Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning & Robert Browning. Robert Browning

that they would give up Casa Guidi that year, and take a villa in Florence, instead. They were endeavoring to secure an apartment in Palazzo Barberini for the winter, the Storys being most anxious that they should be thus near together, and Mrs. Browning discussed with him the furnishing of the rooms in case they decided upon the Palazzo. Only that morning Mr. Lytton had called, and while Mrs. Browning did not see him, her husband talked with him nearly all the morning. Late in the evening she seemed a little wandering, but soon she slept, waking again about four, when they talked together, and she seemed to almost pass into a state of ecstasy, expressing to him in the most ardent and tender words her love and her happiness. The glow of the luminous Florentine dawn brightened in the room, and with the words “It is beautiful!” she passed into that realm of life and light and loveliness in which she had always seemed to dwell.

      “And half we deemed she needed not

       The changing of her sphere,

       To give to heaven a Shining One,

       Who walked an angel here.”

      The English Cemetery, Florence, in which Mrs. Browning is Buried.

      Curiously, Miss Blagden had not slept at all that night. After her return from her visit to Mrs. Browning the previous afternoon, “every trace of fatigue vanished,” she wrote to a friend, “and all my faculties seemed singularly alert. I was unable to sleep, and sat writing letters till dawn, when a cabman came to tell me ‘La Signora della Casa Guidi e morte!’”

      The Storys came immediately from Leghorn, and Miss Blagden took Edith Story and Penini to her villa. It was touching to see his little friend’s endeavor to comfort the motherless boy. Mr. and Mrs. Story stayed with Browning in the rooms where everything spoke of her presence: the table, strewn with her letters and books; her little chair, a deep armchair of dark green velvet, which her son now holds sacred among his treasures, was drawn by the table just as she had left it, and in her portfolio was a half-finished letter to Madame Mario, speaking of Cavour, and her noble aspirations for Italy.

      In the late afternoon of July 1, 1861, a group of English and American, with many Italian friends gathered about the little casket in the lovely cypress-shaded English cemetery of Florence, and as the sun was sinking below the purple hills it was tenderly laid away, while the amethyst mountains hid their faces in a misty veil.

       “What would we give to our beloved?

       The hero’s heart to be unmoved,

       The poet’s star-tuned harp to sweep.

       ······

       God strikes a silence through you all,

       And giveth His beloved, sleep.”

      Almost could the friends gathered there hear her poet-voice saying:

      “And friends, dear friends, when it shall be

       That this low breath is gone from me,

       And round my bier ye come to weep,

       Let One, most loving of you all,

       Say ‘Not a tear must o’er her fall!

       He giveth His beloved, sleep.’”