Their Pisan home was amid sacred associations. It was situate in an old palazzo built by Vasari, within sight of the Leaning Tower and the Duomo. There, in absolute seclusion, they wrote and planned. Once and again they made a pilgrimage to the Lanfranchi Palace "to walk in the footsteps of Byron and Shelley": occasionally they went to Vespers in the Duomo, and listened, rapt, to the music wandering spirally through the vast solitary building: once they were fortunate in hearing the impressive musical mass for the dead, in the Campo Santo. They were even reminded often of their distant friend Horne, for every time they crossed one of the chief piazzas they saw the statue of Cosimo de Medici looking down upon them.
In this beautiful old city, so full of repose as it lies "asleep in the sun,"
Mrs. Browning's health almost leapt, so swift was her advance towards vigour.
"She is getting better every day," wrote her husband,
"stronger, better wonderfully, and beyond all our hopes."
That happy first winter they passed "in the most secluded manner, reading Vasari, and dreaming dreams of seeing Venice in the summer." But early in April, when the swallows had flown inland above the pines of Viareggio, and Shelley's favourite little Aziola was hooting silverly among the hollow vales of Carrara, the two poets prepared to leave what the frailer of them called "this perch of Pisa."
But with all its charm and happy associations, the little city was dull. "Even human faces divine are quite `rococo' with me," Mrs. Browning wrote to a friend. The change to Florence was a welcome one to both. Browning had already been there, but to his wife it was as the fulfilment of a dream. They did not at first go to that romantic old palace which will be for ever sociate with the author of "Casa Guidi Windows", but found accommodation in a more central locality.
When the June heats came, husband and wife both declared for Ancona, the picturesque little town which dreams out upon the Adriatic. But though so close to the sea, Ancona is in summer time almost insufferably hot. Instead of finding it cooler than Florence, it was as though they had leapt right into a cauldron. Alluding to it months later, Mrs. Browning wrote to Horne, "The heat was just the fiercest fire of your imagination, and I SEETHE to think of it at this distance."
It was a memorable journey all the same. They went to Ravenna, and at four o'clock one morning stood by Dante's tomb, moved deeply by the pathetic inscription and by all the associations it evoked. All along the coast from Ravenna to Loretto was new ground to both, and endlessly fascinating; in the passing and repassing of the Apennines they had `wonderful visions of beauty and glory.' At Ancona itself, notwithstanding the heat, they spent a happy season. Here Browning wrote one of the loveliest of his short poems, "The Guardian Angel", which had its origin in Guercino's picture in the chapel at Fano. By the allusions in the sixth and eighth stanzas it is clear that the poem was inscribed to Alfred Domett, the poet's well-loved friend immortalised as "Waring". Doubtless it was written for no other reason than the urgency of song, for in it are the loving allusions to his wife, "MY angel with me too," and "my love is here." Three times they went to the chapel, he tells us in the seventh stanza, to drink in to their souls' content the beauty of "dear Guercino's" picture. Browning has rarely uttered the purely personal note of his inner life. It is this that affords a peculiar value to "The Guardian Angel", over and above its technical beauty. In the concluding lines of the stanzas I am about to quote he gives the supreme expression to what was his deepest faith, his profoundest song-motive.
"I would not look up thither past thy head
Because the door opes, like that child, I know,
For I should have thy gracious face instead,
Thou bird of God! And wilt thou bend me low
Like him, and lay, like his, my hands together,
And lift them up to pray, and gently tether
Me, as thy lamb there, with thy garment's spread?
. . . . .
"How soon all worldly wrong would be repaired!
I think how I should view the earth and skies
And sea, when once again my brow was bared
After thy healing, with such different eyes.
O world, as God has made it! All is beauty:
And knowing this, is love, and love is duty.
What further may be sought for or declared?"
After the Adriatic coast was left, they hesitated as to returning to Florence, the doctors having laid such stress on the climatic suitability of Pisa for Mrs. Browning. But she felt so sure of herself in her new strength that it was decided to adventure upon at least one winter in the queen-city. They were fortunate in obtaining a residence in the old palace called Casa Guidi, in the Via Maggiore, over against the church of San Felice, and here, with a few brief intervals, they lived till death separated them.