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 return. His 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. 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 blunder. ing 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." 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. Music 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 subtiler 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 add the brief final record of his contentment in his son's marriage in 1887, his removal to the house he bought in De Vere Gardens, the gradual weakening of his robust health in his last years, his painless death in Venice in his son's Palazzo Rezzonico on the very day, December 12, 1889, of the issue of Asolando' in London, his burial in Westminster Abbey in Poets' Corner, December 31, and the story of Robert Browning's earthly life is told. CHARLOTTE Porter. May 20, 1896. CRITICAL INTRODUCTION. "What were life Did soul stand still therein, forego her strife -'PARLEYINGS: WITH GERARD DE LAIRESSE.' WHAT principle guided Browning in making the present Selections 66 from his poetry? On this interesting question there is no other light than the hint he gives in his preface, that he had strung together certain pieces on the thread of an imaginary personality," and the internal evidence which the poems themselves offer of their susceptibility to an inter-relationship of this sort. 'My Star,' striking a preluding note of love, seems to usher in poems broadly capable of being grouped together on the score of their expressing, in a fresh way, indicative of a youthful attitude toward life, various phases of love, either as sensation or as observed or recorded experience. Poems follow of a more active sort, adventurous and partisan in spirit, — the 'Good News,' the 'Lost Leader,' and others, which belong to the outlook of manhood; and these pass again, in subject, into the groove of love, but from the standpoint, now, of the stress and trial belonging to maturer life and thought. Larger themes succeed, related to national characteristics and history, to art, to music, to religion, and, finally, the summing up of life's meanings natural to ripe vision. The second series of Selections, made by Browning eight years later, follows, in general, a similar line of evolving thought and experience. If it be granted that some such natural development of a typical experience, not personal to Browning, underlies these Selections, the clue it supplies for a brief critical consideration of the poet's distinctive traits, as shown throughout his work and representatively in this volume, is peculiarly trustworthy and appropriate because it is the poet's own clue. He disclaimed a selection based on an assumption of judgment as to what was best; he made a selection based upon motive, The poetic motive informing Browning's work is, in one word, aspiration, which moulds and develops the varied and complex personalities of the humanity he depicts, as the persistent energy of the scientist, holding its never-wearying way, gives to the world of phenomena its infinite array of shows and shapes. Aspiration—a reaching on and upwards — is the primal energy underneath that law which we call progress. Through aspiration, ideals — social, religious, artistic — are formed; and through it ideals perish, as it breaks away from them to seek more complete realizations of truth. Aspiration, therefore, has its negative as well as its positive side. While it ever urges the human soul to love and achievement, through its very persistence the soul learns that the perfect flowering of its rare imaginings is not possible of attainment in this life. Assurance of the ultimate fulfilment of the ideal is one of the forms in which Browning unfolds the workings of this life principle, well illustrated in 'Abt Vogler,' who has implicit faith in his own intuitions of a final harmony; or in those poems where the crowning of aspiration in a supreme earthly love flashes upon the understanding a clear vision of infinite love. But by far the larger number of poems discloses the underlying force at work in ways more subtle and obscure, through the conflict of good and evil, of lower with higher ideals, either as emphasized in great social movements, in the struggle between individuals, or in struggles fought out on the battle-ground within every human soul. With a motive so all-inclusive, the whole panorama of human life, with its loves and hates, its strivings and failures, its half-reasonings and beguiling sophistries, is material ready at hand for illustration. Browning, inspired with a democratic inclusiveness, allowed his choice in subject-matter to range through fields both new and old, unploughed by any poet before him. Progress, to be imaged forth in its entirety, must be interpreted, not only through the individual soul, but through the collective soul of the human race; wherefore many phases of civilization and many attitudes of mind must be detailed for service. There is no choosing a subject, as a Tennyson might, on the ground that it will best point the moral of a preconceived theory of life; on the contrary, every such theory is bound to be of interest as one of the phenomena exhibited by the transcending principle. From first to last Browning portrayed life either developing or at some crucial moment, the outcome of past development, or the determinative influence for future growth or decay. His interest in the phenomena of life as a whole, freed him from the trammels of any literary cult. He steps out from under the yoke of the classicist, where only gods and heroes have leave to breathe; and, |