such poetry as a private possession. "I dared not," he said, "reserve to myself the finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's." They were accordingly published in 1850, under the intentionally mystifying title, Sonnets from the Portuguese.

The Brownings reached Florence April 20, 1847. After several changes they were, in May, 1848, established in the home in which they remained during Mrs. Browning's life. It was a suite of rooms on the second floor of the Palazzo Guidi. Of the practical side of this early Florentine life, Mrs. Browning wrote, "My dear brothers have the illusion that nobody should marry on less than two thousand a year. Good heavens! how preposterous it does seem to me! We scarcely spend three hundred, and I have every luxury I ever had, and which it would be so easy to give up, at need; and Robert wouldn't sleep, I think, if an unpaid bill dragged itself by any chance into another week. He says that when people get into pecuniary difficulties his sympathies always go with the butchers and the bakers." In accordance with this horror of owing five shillings five days, the furnishings of the new home, "the rococo chairs, spring sofas, carved bookcases, satin from cardinals' beds, and the rest," were accumulated at a pace dictated by the bank account, but for all that it was not long before the rooms began to take on an aspect as beautiful as it was homelike.

By preference the Brownings lived very quietly. At the end of fifteen months Mrs. Browning wrote, "Robert has not been out an evening of the fifteen months; but what with music and books and writing and talking, we scarcely know how the days go, it's such a gallop on the grass." March 9, 1849, was born Wiedemann, later known as "Penini" or "Pen" Browning. Coincident with this joy was the grief caused by the death of Browning's mother, a sorrow from which he rallied but slowly. The Florentine life was occasionally varied by summers at Bagni di Lucca, winters in Paris or Rome, and several visits to England. There was also an increasing social life. Americans were especially welcome to the Brownings because, while England was still indifferent to Browning's work, America had given it an appreciative welcome. In March, 1861, Mrs. Browning wrote, "I don't complain for myself of an unappreciative public. I have no reason. But just for that reason I complain more about Robert.... In America he is a power, a writer, a poet—he is read, he lives in the hearts of the people."[4]

Among the Americans associated with the Brownings for longer or shorter periods during their life in Florence were two distinguished women, Margaret Fuller Ossoli and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 1847, George William Curtis spent two days with the Brownings at Vallombrosa, a visit later described in his Easy Chair. Mr. Field, who had brought out the American reprint of the two-volume edition of Browning's poems in 1849, was a guest at Casa Guidi in 1852. Charles Sumner writes of "delicious Tuscan evenings" with the Brownings and the Storys in 1859. Mr. Browning's interests in art led to friendships with American artists, among whom were Mr. Page, who painted a successful portrait of Browning; Miss Harriet Hosmer, to whom Mr. and Mrs. Browning finally consented to sit for the "Clasped Hands"; and Hiram Powers. The dearest American friends were, however, Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne and Mr. and Mrs. Story.

Music and art were among Browning's chief delights in Florence. George William Curtis in describing the trip to Vallombrosa says that it was part of their pleasure to sit in the dusky convent chapel while Browning at the organ "chased a fugue of Master Hughes of Saxe Gotha, or dreamed out upon twilight keys a faint throbbing toccata of Galuppi's." Modeling in clay was even more satisfying as a personal resource. In the autumn of 1860 Mrs. Browning wrote, "Robert has taken to modeling under Mr. Story (at his studio) and is making extraordinary progress, turning to account his studies in anatomy. He has copied already two busts, the young Augustus and the Psyche, and is engaged on another, enchanted with his new trade, working six hours a day." Some months later she added, "The modeling combines body-work and soul-work, and the more tired he has been, and the more his back ached, poor fellow, the more he has exulted and been happy—'no, nothing ever made him so happy before.'" He found, also, an unfailing pleasure in the study of great pictures. And he was a buyer of pictures with a collector's delight in hunting out the work of the unappreciated early Tuscan artists. Mrs. Orr says that he owned at least one picture by each of the obscure artists mentioned in "Old Pictures in Florence."

Mrs. Browning sometimes expressed regret that Browning should give himself so unreservedly in so many directions, because she felt that he had thus too little time and energy left for poetry. Her fear was not without justification, for after the richly productive period from 1841 to 1846, we come upon a space of nine years the only publications of which are, in 1850, Christmas Eve and Easter Day, a long poem in two parts giving the arguments in favor of Christianity; and, in 1852, an introduction to a collection of letters then supposed to be by Shelley, but since found to be spurious. The essay is nevertheless of importance as an exposition of Browning's theory of poetry, and as an interesting study of Shelley.

In 1855, at the close of this period of nine years, there appeared a collection of fifty-one poems entitled Men and Women. In "fundamental brain power," insight, beauty, and mastery of style, these poems show Browning at the highest level of his poetic achievement. It is in these remarkable poems that he brought to perfection a poetic form which he practically invented, the dramatic monologue, a form in which there is but one speaker but which is essentially dramatic in effect. The dramatic quality arises partly from the implied presence of listeners whose expressions of assent or dissent determine the progress or the abrupt changes of direction of the speaker's words. In "Andrea del Sarto," for example, Lucrezia's smiles and frowns and gestures of impatience are a constant influence, and the poem presents as vivid an interplay of personalities as any scene in a drama. But the implied listener is hardly more than a secondary dramatic element, the chief one being that the speaker talks, as do the characters in a play, out of the demands of the immediate experience, gradually and casually disclosing all the tangled web of influence, all the clashes of will with destiny, of desire with convention, that have led to the crisis depicted. Fra Lippo Lippi gives no consecutive history of his life, only such snatches of it as partially account for his present mad freak, but the strife between his own nature and instinct on the one hand and the conventions and traditions of religious art on the other could hardly be more vividly presented. In a Balcony, the one drama in Men and Women, has but a fragment of a plot, but in intensity, reality, and passion it excels most of Browning's dramas, and, in spite of its long speeches, has proved effective on the stage.[5] In variety of theme, subject-matter, and verse-form, the poems of Men and Women defy classification. Whatever