Poetry was to her as serious a thing as life itself. "There has been no playing at skittles for me in either poetry, or life," she said; "I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry; nor leisure, for the hour of the poet."
In the success of "Aurora Leigh" she was herself surprised. Private letters from strangers filled with the warmest, even if sometimes indiscriminate, praises, rained down upon her, and she found the press "astonishing in its good will." That her "golden-hearted Robert" was "in ecstasies about it, far more than as if it had been a book of his own," was apparently her most precious reward. Milsand, who she had fancied would hardly like this poem, wrote a critique of it for the _Revue_ which touched her with its "extraordinary kindness." He asked and obtained permission to translate it into French, and in a letter to Miss Sarianna Browning she speaks of her happiness that he should thus distinguish the poem.
Soon after their arrival in Florence came the saddest of news, that of the death of John Kenyon, their beloved friend, whose last thoughtful kindness was to endow them with a legacy insuring to them that freedom from material care which is so indispensable to the best achievements in art. During his life he had given to them one hundred pounds a year, and in his will he left them ten thousand guineas,--the largest of the many legacies that his generous will contained.
The carnival, always gay in Florence, was exceedingly so that year, and Penini, whose ardor for a blue domino was gratified, and who thought of nothing else for the time being, seemed to communicate his raptures, so that Browning proposed taking a box at the opera ball, and entertaining some invited friends with gallantina and champagne. Suddenly the air grew very mild, and he decided that his wife might and must go; she sent out hastily to buy a mask and domino (he had already a beautiful black silk one, which she later transmuted into a black silk gown for herself), and while her endurance and amusement kept her till two o'clock in the morning, the poet and his friends remained till after four. The Italian carnival, however wild and free it may be (and is), yet never degenerates into rudeness. The inborn delicacy and gentle refinement of the people render this impossible. Yet for the time being there is perfect social equality, and at this ball the Grand Duke and Wilson's husband, Ferdinando, were on terms of fellowship.