The first fine careless rapture!"
Standing by the grave of the English poetess in the beauty of a May day, with the blue sky above it, the air filled with the fragrance of flowers and the songs of birds, it seemed to us that they were wise who decided that Elizabeth Browning's tomb should be here, in this Italy that she loved, and among the Florentines who adored her, rather than in the vast gloom of the abbey where her husband lies and where she is by right entitled to rest among the great of England.
Two other English poets sleep in this cemetery, Arthur Hugh Clough and Walter Savage Landor. Landor died in Florence in a house on the Via Nunziatina, in 1864. As we stood by his grave, Zelphine softly murmured Swinburne's lovely lines to his brother poet:
"So shall thy lovers, come from far,
Mix with thy name,
As morning-star with evening-star,
His faultless fame."
This afternoon, returning from Katharine's studio, which is beyond the Porta Romana, as we passed the vast monotonous façade of Palazzo Pitti and entered the Via Maggio, we were attracted by a tall gray house with a white tablet above its first-floor windows. "The Casa Guidi!" exclaimed Zelphine, reading the words in which the Florentines recorded their love and gratitude to the woman poet who had by her golden ring of verse linked Italy to England. The well-known lines by the poet Tommaseo are inscribed in letters of gold upon the marble tablet, in Italian of course, but I am quite sure that Zelphine could read an inscription to the Brownings in Hindustani. After lingering long before the windows of the primo piano, which will always be associated with the Brownings, we walked around the corner to the Piazza Santa Felicità and looked up at the terrace where Mrs. Browning spent so many days, and up and down which she described her husband as walking with the third Browning in his arms.
I must frankly confess that we were disappointed in the terrace, as we had expected to see one of the charming garden terraces, adorned with blooming plants and even trees, in which the Italians delight to find rest and seclusion above the noise and dirt of the street; instead we saw only a balcony overhanging the piazza, with a few straggling plants in pots. So small is this balcony that Mr. Browning's goodly proportions must have filled all the available space, even if it was quite large enough for the fairy-like lady who sat there through long summer days. Do you remember that she wrote to Miss Mitford that she was so happy despite the intense heat that she could quite comprehend the possibility of St. Lawrence's ecstasies on a gridiron? In another letter Mrs. Browning wrote, "Here we can step out of the window on a sort of balcony terrace which is quite private, and swims over with moonlight in the evenings, and as we live upon watermelons, iced water, and figs, and all manner of fruit, we bear the heat with angelic patience and felicity which are really edifying."
It is not strange that, with new happiness and renewed health, everything in Florence was glorified to Mrs. Browning, and that the Casa Guidi apartment, with its windows looking out upon the Pitti Palace on one side and on the other "toward the gray wall of a church, called San Felice, for good omen," seemed a bit of Paradise.