“... I can’t say anything now except that he is one of the nicest people to pass an evening with in London. He is a clear-headed and particularly clear-eyed man of the world, devoted to society, one of the greatest diners-out in London, cordial and hearty, shakes your hand as if he were really glad to see you.... As to his talk it wasn’t ‘Sordello,’ and it wasn’t as fine as ‘Paracelsus,’ but nobody ever talked more nobly, truly, and cheerily than he. I went home and slept after hearing him as one does after a fresh starlight walk with a good cool breeze on his face.”

In 1863, on July 19, a little more than two years after the death of Mrs. Browning, Arabel Barrett had a dream, in which she was speaking with her sister Elizabeth, and asked, “When shall I be with you?” “Dearest, in five years,” was the reply. She told this dream to Mr. Browning, who recorded it at the time. In June of 1868 Miss Barrett died, the time lacking one month only of being the five years. “Only a coincidence, but noticeable,” Mr. Browning wrote to Isa Blagden. But in the larger knowledge that we now have of the nature of life and the phenomena of sleep, that the ethereal body is temporarily released from the physical (sleep being the same as death, save that in the latter the magnetic cord is severed, and the separation is final)—in the light of this larger knowledge it is easy to realize that the two sisters actually met in the ethereal realm, and that the question was asked and answered according to Miss Barrett’s impression. The event was sudden, its immediate cause being rheumatic affection of the heart, and she died in Browning’s arms, as did his wife. Her companionship had been a great comfort to him, and Mr. Gosse notes that for many years after her death he could not bear to pass Delamere Terrace.

The late summer of that year was devoted to traveling from Cannes about the coast, and they finally decided on Audierne for a sojourn. “Sarianna and I have just returned from a four hours’ walk,” he writes to a friend from this place; but here, as everywhere, he was haunted by Florentine memories, and by intense longings for his vanished paradise. To Isa Blagden he wrote:

“I feel as if I should immensely like to glide along for a summer day through the streets and between the old stone walls, unseen come and unheard go,—perhaps by some miracle I shall do so ... Oh, me! to find myself some late sunshiny afternoon with my face turned toward Florence....”

While at Audierne, Browning put the final touches to the new six-volume edition of his works that was about to appear from the house of Smith, Elder, and Company, on the title-page of which he signs himself as M.A., Honorary Fellow of Balliol College. Mr. Nettleship’s volume of essays on Browning’s poems was published that season, indicating a strong interest in the poet; and another very gratifying experience to him was the interest in his work manifested by the undergraduates of both Oxford and Cambridge. Undoubtedly the pleasant glow of this appreciation stimulated his energy in the great poem on which he was now definitely at work, “The Ring and the Book.” Publishers were making him offers for its publication, “the R. B. who for six months once did not sell a single copy of his poems,” he exclaimed in a letter to a friend, to whom he announced that he should “ask two hundred pounds for the sheets to America, and get it!” with an evident conviction that this was a high price for his work. The increasing recognition of the poet was further indicated by a request from Tauchnitz for the volumes of selections which Browning dedicated to the Laureate in these graceful words: “To Alfred Tennyson. In Poetry—illustrious and consummate; In Friendship—noble and sincere.”

The publication of “The Ring and the Book” was the great literary event of 1869. Two numbers had appeared in the previous autumn, but when offered in its completeness the poem was found to embody the most remarkable interpretation of transfigured human life to be found in all the literature of poetry. The fame of the poet rose to splendor. This work was the inauguration of an epoch, of a period from which his work was to be read, studied, discussed, to a degree that would have been incredible to him, had any Cassandra of previous years lifted the veil of the future. The great reviews united in a very choral pean of praise; the Fortnightly, the Quarterly, the Edinburgh Review, the Revue des Deux Mondes, and others were practically unanimous in their recognition of a work which was at once felt to be the very epitome of the art and life of Robert Browning. The poem is, indeed, a vast treasure into which the poet poured all his searching, relentless analysis of character, and grasp of motive; all his compassion, his sensitive susceptibility to human emotion; all his gift of brilliant movement; all his heroic enthusiasms, and his power of luminous perception. But all this wealth of feeling and thought had been passed through the crucible of his critical creation; it had been fused and recast by the alchemy of genius. He transmuted fact into truth.

“Do you see this Ring?
’T is Rome-work made to match
(By Castellani’s imitative craft)
Etrurian circlets....
······
I fused my live soul and that inert stuff,
Before attempting smithcraft....”

The “square old yellow book” which Browning had chanced upon in the market-place of San Lorenzo, in that June of 1860, was not a volume, but a “lawyer’s file of documents and pamphlets.” In relating how he found the book Browning says, in the poem:

“... I found this book,
Gave a lira for it, eightpence English just,
(Mark the predestination!) when a Hand,
Always above my shoulder, pushed me once,
······
Across a Square in Florence, crammed with booths.”

He stepped out on the narrow terrace, built