I never lost the impressions of human wrong there
gathered into a telling argument. The crowded hurry and the dirty
creatures that attend commercial greed and selfish enjoyment in cities
everywhere weltered along the sidewalks and unhesitatingly plunged
into the mud of the streets. It seemed to me even then that something
should be done for the children maimed by inhuman fathers, and for
their weeping mothers too. My father did not forget in his art the
note he found in beautiful Florence, though it was too sad to
introduce by a definite exposition, and falls upon the ear, in "Monte
Beni," like a wordless minor chord.
I sometimes went with my mother when she called at Casa Guidi, where
the Brownings lived. I had a fixed idea that Galileo belonged to
their family circle; and I had a vision of him in my mind which was
quite as clear as Mrs. Browning ever was (although I sat upon her
lap), representing him as holding the sun captive in his back yard,
while he blinked down upon it from a high prison of his own. The
house, as I recall it, seemed to have a network of second-story
piazzas, and the rooms were very much shadowed and delightfully cool.
Mr. Browning was shining in the shadow, by the temperate brightness of
mind alone, and ever talking merrily. Cultivated English folk are
endowed with sounding gayety of voice, but he surpassed them all, as
the medley of his rushing thought and the glorious cheer of his
perception would suggest. Mrs. Browning was there: so you knew by her
heavy dark curls and white cheeks, but doubted, nevertheless, when you
came to meet her great eyes, so dreamy that you wondered which was
alive, you or she.
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