ing's family was soon transformed into love for Mrs. Browning, while Mr. Kenyon, who had not been told because, as Mrs. Browning said, she did not wish to implicate any one in the deception she was obliged to practise against her father, was overjoyed at the result of his kindly offices in bringing the two poets together.

After a journey full of suffering for Mrs. Browning and the tenderest devotion on the part of Mr. Browning, they halted at Pisa, memorable as the spot where Mrs. Browning presented her husband with the matchless" Sonnets from the Portuguese." Mrs. Browning's health improved greatly in the genial climate.

The whole of their married life, with the exception of occasional summers in England and two winters in Paris, was spent in Italy; and what that married life was in its harmonious blending of two unusually congenial souls we have abundant evidence in the glimpses obtained from Mrs. Browning's letters, and the recollections of it in the minds of their many friends.

In the summer of 1847 they established themselves in Florence in the Casa Guidi. It became practically their Italian home, varied by sojourns in Ancona, at the baths of Lucca, Venice, and winters in Rome in 1854 and 1859.

In Florence, March 9, 1849, their son was born, and to Mrs. Browning's life, especially, was added one more element of intense happiness. Mrs. Orr thinks that in Pompilia, in "The Ring and the Book,' is reflected the maternal joy as Browning saw it revealed in Mrs. Browning's relation to her son. A shadow was at the same time cast over Browning's life by the death of his mother, who died just as the news wa

received of the birth of her grandchild. Mrs. Browning, writing to a friend, said, "My husband has been in the greatest anguish. . . . He has loved his mother as such passionate natures only can love, and I never saw a man so bowed down in an extremity of sorrow,

The first effect of Browning's marriage seems to have been to put his muse to sleep. Up to 1850 the only events in his literary career were the performance of the "Blot" at Sadler's Wells in 1848, and the issue of a collected edition of his works in 1849. In 1850, in Florence, he wrote "Christmas Eve" and "Easter Day," and in Paris, 1857, the "Essay on Shelley" to be prefixed to twenty-five letters of Shelley's, that afterwards turned out to be spurious.

The fifty poems in " Men and W omen complete the record of Browning's work during his wife's life. They appeared in 1855, and reflect very directly new sources of inspiration which had come into his life with his marriage.

Though Mr. and Mrs. Browning led a comparatively quiet life, they gathered around them, wherever they were, a distinguished circle of friends. In the early days at Florence they much enjoyed the society. of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Joseph Milsand and George Sand the first a cherished friend, the last simply an acquaintance connect themselves with their life in Paris, while in London and Rome all the bright particular stars of the time circled about them, some of whom were the Storys, the Hawthornes, the Carlyles, the Kemble sisters, Cardinal Manning, Sir Frederick Leighton, Rossetti, Val Princeps, and Landor.

Mrs. Browning's death at dawn, on the 29th of June, 1861, cut short the golden period of these

Italian days. Even in his bereavement he had cause to be poignantly happy. For he had watched beside his wife on that last night, and she, weak, though suffering little and without presentiment of the end which even to him seemed not so imminent, had given him, as he wrote, "what my heart will keep till I see her again and longer, the most perfect expression of her love to me within my whole knowledge of her." He added, "I shall grow still, I hope, but my root is taken and remains.' He left Florence never to reHis settling in London that winter was a result of his wife's death, destined to bring him into closer touch with an English public which was to like him yet. The change was dictated by his care for his son's education, whose well-being he considered a trust from his wife.

turn.

In 1862 he wrote from Biarritz of Pen's" enjoyment of his holidays, adding, " for me I have got on by having a great read at Euripides besides attending to my own matters, my new poem that is about to be and of which the whole is pretty well in my head - the Roman murder story." But the Roman murder story was long in taking shape as "The Ring and the Book." It had been conceived in one of his last June evenings at Casa Guidi, but the rude break in his life made by Mrs. Browning's death remains marked in the record of this work's incubation. During the next years spent in London, with holidays in Brittany, work went steadily on, first for the three-volume collected edition of 1863 of his works, and then for "Dramatis Personæ," published in the year following, before "The Ring and the Book" came out at last, in 1868. With the appearance of this and the six-volume edition of his works, the poet began to reap the abundant fruits of a slow but solidly founded fame.

It was not until 1871, however, that the "great read at Euripides" showed its significance in "Balaustion's Adventure," and, four years later again, in "Aristophanes' Apology," rounding out thus his original criticism of Greek life and literature, and especially affecting Euripides the human," whom his wife had been earliest to deliver from blundering censure.

While in the midst of this prosperous scheme of work he wrote: "I feel such comfort and delight in doing the best I can with my own object of life, poetry, which, I think, I never could have seen the good of before, that it shows me I have taken the root I did take well. I hope to do much more — and that the flower of it will be put into Her hand somehow."

Mu

His father had died in Paris in 1866, at the age of eighty-five. Brother and sister, now each left alone, lived together thenceforth a life of tranquil uneventfulness, alternating between London and the Continent, a life rich in pleasant acquaintances and warm friendships, and increasingly full of invitations and honors of all sorts for the poet. Supreme among the friendships was that with Miss Anne Egerton Smith. sic was the special bond of sympathy between her and Browning, and while they were both in London no important concert lacked their appreciation. Miss Browning, her brother, and Miss Smith spent also four successive summers together, the fourth at Salève, near Geneva, where Miss Smith's sudden death was the occasion of Browning's poem on immortality, "La Saisiaz." Among the honors the poet received were the organization of the London Browning Society in 1881, degrees from Oxford and from Cambridge, and nominations for the rectorship of Glasgow University

and for that of St. Andrews. The latter was.a unanimous nomination from the students, and as an evidence of the younger generation's esteem of his poetic influence was more than commonly gratifying to Browning, although he declined this and all other such overtures.

His activities during the remainder of his days, his social and friendly life in London and later in Venice, were habitually cheerful and genial. He sedulously cultivated happiness. This was indeed the consistent result of the fact to which those who knew him best bear witness, that he held the great lyric love of his life as sacred, and cherished it as a religion. Those who know the whole body of his work most intimately will be readiest to corroborate this on subtler evidence; for only on the hypothesis of a unique revelation of the significance of a supreme human love from whose large sureness smaller dramatic exemplifications of love in life derive their vitality, can the varied overplay of his art and the deep sufficiency of his religious reconciliation of Power and Love be adequately understood. As he himself once said, the romance of his life was in his own soul. To this perhaps the bibliography of his works will ever provide the most accurate outline map.

After the issue of his Greek pieces, the most noticeable new features of his remaining work may be summed up as idyllic and lyric. A new picturesqueness interpenetrated his dramatic pieces, as if he were dowered with a fresh pleasure in eyesight. This was shown in the " Dramatic Idyls." A new purity intensified his lyrical faculty. This is shown in the lyrics in Ferishtah's Fancies" and in "Asolando."

To his whole achieved work there remains to be added only the brief final record of his contentment in