That waft her where the Apennine looks down
On Arno."
One year when she visited us, she brought with her her Italian maid, Irene, a handsome wild creature, who spent the days in singing Tuscan stornelli, and munching yet unripe apples in our Kentish orchard. The two little poems, already alluded to, of "Wild Flowers" and "The Invitation," express even with scarcely sufficient ardour the feeling of exultation and delight with which her face was ever turned from the Northern Sea to
Lithe green reeds with lifted spear,
Purple grapes 'mid ripening grain."
Her own abode in the Villa Castellani, modest as it comparatively was, invariably filled one with admiration and envy, whether by reason of its commodiousness, the beauty and retirement of its pretty garden, the excellence of its site, or the unequalled glory of its prospect. On one side was Florence itself, that dream in marble; on the other, the broad middle valley of the Arno, every rood of it visible to the eye even to where it narrows into the defile of La Golfina, fat with centuries of industrious yet beautiful cultivation, and studded with fair campanili and villas,
Vermene germogliar suole e rampolli;"
a plain, which "to look on is to love." There she wrote her poems, and cultivated her anemones and tulips tall,
