Monument To Dante, in the Piazza di Santa Croce.
Stefano Ricci.
| “....The architect and hewer Did pile the empty marbles as thy tomb.” |
| Casa Guidi Windows. |
It was during this villeggiatura that Mrs. Browning, one morning after their breakfast, with shy sweetness, tucked the pages of the “Sonnets” into her husband’s pocket and swiftly vanished. Robert Barrett Browning, who, as already noted, gave the history of this poetic interlude viva voce, has also recorded it in writing, as follows:
What earthly vocabulary can offer fit words in which to speak of celestial beauty? How these exquisite “Sonnets” tell the story of that romance of Genius and Love,—from the woman’s first thrill of interest in the poetry of an unknown poet, to the hour when he, “the princely giver,” brought to her “the gold and purple” of his heart
“For such as I to take or leave withal,”
and she questions
“Can it be right to give what I can give?”
with the fear that her delicacy of health should make such gifts
“Be counted with the ungenerous.”
But she thinks of how he “was in the world a year ago,” and thus she drinks