An American in Florence Meets
the Brownings, 18^4-18^5-

LEWIS LEARY
 

r
 

V ]f "THROUGH the autumn of 1854 into the summer of
1855, Elizabeth Dodge Kinney kept a diary of her
experiences in Florence,^ where she lived with her hus¬
band, the Hon. William Burnett Kinney, who was attached to
the American diplomatic service. New England born and the
mother by a former marriage of grown sons, one of whom was
Edmund Clarence Stedman, she was something of a bluestocking
as well and was proud of the friends she made in Italy. Hiram
Powers, the American sculptor, Hved just across the street, and
Mrs. Frances TroUope and her son were neighbors, as were the
two brothers of Alfred Tennyson who were strange people, she
thought, withdrawn and aesthetic, very much unlike the fun-
loving, food-loving, popular Charles Lever who attended so many
parties that it seemed impossible he should write as much as he
did. But more than any of the rest, she admired the Brownings,
whose Casa Guidi was only a few squares away from her own
Casa del Bella on Via Serragli.

Mrs. Browning was her favorite, though she seemed "the most
fragile-looking of human beings," so wan and ill and in such con¬
stant pain. At one time Mrs. Kinney reported that her neighbor
was recently much improved through taking cod liver oil, and
was "really getting fat on it." At another time she was less san-

^ This journal and many of the letters which Mrs. Kinney at this time
wrote to her family in America are in the Edmund Clarence Stedman
Collection in the Columbia University Libraries. Some of the material in
the present account of her observation appeared in a somewhat dllTerent
form as "A Gossip from Florence: 1855" in Festschrift fiir Waliher
Fischer, Heidelberg, C. Winter, 1959.