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Updated: May 1, 2025
It is a heart which runs over very often with a grateful joy for a most peculiar destiny, even in the midst of some bitter drawbacks which I need not allude to farther.... May God bless you continually, even as I am Your affectionate BA. To Mrs. Jameson Palazzo Guidi: July 15, .
In that year, or early in 1845, he became engaged to Miss Elizabeth Barrett, their acquaintance beginning through a friend, her cousin, and through letters from Browning expressing admiration for her poems. Mrs. Browning died there, at Casa Guidi, in June 1861. Browning left Florence some time afterward, and in spite of his later visits to Italy, never returned there.
These shepherd girls, these contadini and their wives and children, they have outlived the Conti Guidi, they have outlasted the greatest of the lords; like the flowers, they run among the stones without a thought of that brutal greatness that would have enslaved them if it could. Not by violence have they conquered, but by love; not by death, but by life.
Of the last the most conspicuous are the marble tomb of Alessandro Guidi, the Italian lyric poet, who died in 1712; and the simple cenotaph in the last chapel on the left of one of the titular cardinals of the church, who died in 1849, the celebrated linguist Mezzofante.
At Casa Guidi Browning wrote, among other poems, "Christinas Eve and Easter Day," "The Statue and the Bust" of which I have said something in chapter XIX, and the "Old Pictures in Florence," that philosophic commentary on Vasari, which ends with the spirited appeal for the crowning of Giotto's Campanile with the addition of the golden spire that its builder intended
When Mrs Trollope called at Casa Guidi, Browning was only reluctantly present; she had written against liberal institutions and against the poetry of Victor Hugo, and that was enough. Might it not have been more truly liberal to be patient and understand the grounds of her prejudice?
Mrs Browning's letters croon with happiness in the beauty, the strength, the intelligence, the kind-hearted disposition of her boy. And the boy's father, from the days when he would walk up and down the terrace of Casa Guidi with the infant in his arms to the last days of his life, felt to the full the gladness and the repose that came with this strong bondage of his heart.
Those who have known Casa Guidi as it was could hardly enter the loved rooms now and speak above a whisper.
This betrayal cannot be passed by without severe reproach to Bonifacio Cerchi and Giovanni Guidi, two Florentine exiles who were suffering their banishment in Pisa. Thereupon Castruccio seized Benedetto and put him to death, and beheaded many other noble citizens, and drove their families into exile.
It was not any joyful thing that I saw, splendid though it was, but the ruined castles, blind and broken, of the Counts Guidi: Porciano itself, line a jagged menace, rises across Arno, which is heard but not seen; farther, on the crest of a blue hill, round which evening gathers out of the woods, rises the great ruin of Romena like a broken oath; while farther still, far away on its hill in a fold of the valley, Poppi thrusts its fierce tower into the sky, a cruel boast that came to nothing.
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