Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MRS. BROWNING It was one of the first hot days of last May that I visited the old disused Protestant cemetery at Florence. Formerly it sloped upwards against the city wall; but the wall has long since been removed, leaving only enough to sustain the earth; and now, surrounded by a high railing, it is a lovely garden in the middle of the broad male. The climbing roses as well as the situation brought back vividly to me those lovely nooks in the angles of the fortress at Corfu which were appropriated to the graves of British officers and soldiers, and which are still kept green and neat, smiling at you as you pass down the wide boulevard. Here, amid the flowers, one reads many names—some well known —of English, Americans, French, Italians, Swedes and Germans, Russians, Poles and Greeks, for all who are not Catholic were formerly interred here; in no order—husband not lying even by wife, nor child always by mother. I saw the flat stone which covers the grave of Landor; I passed the monument of Arthur Hugh Clough; I read the namesof Hiram Powers and Theodore Parker; and finally I came to the tomb of Mrs. Browning. Handfuls of lilies of the valley had been strewed between the low columns that support the sarcophagus, either early that hot morning or late the day before, for they were wilted with the sun. On seeing these evidences of affection to the poetess I wondered to myself whether it were possible nowadays to read her poetry; and, with this in my mind, stopped at a bookshop and bought a volume of selections from her poems. Yes, they could indeed be read, often with pleasure and sometimes with surprise. This little volume of the Tauchnitz series has been edited by Mr. Browning, with a short preface in his own manner, and has been so arranged and ordered as " to allow the charact... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.