to Edinburgh, and the regiment not
dispatched, after all,--it having just returned from India; the poor
fellow wrote in his despair "to know if I could do anything!" He may be
wanted yet: though nothing seems wanted in Egypt, so capital appears to
be the management.'

In 1879 Mr. Browning published the first series of his 'Dramatic Idyls';
and their appearance sent a thrill of surprised admiration through
the public mind. In 'La Saisiaz' and the accompanying poems he had
accomplished what was virtually a life's work. For he was approaching
the appointed limit of man's existence; and the poetic, which had been
nourished in him by the natural life--which had once outstripped its
developments, but on the whole remained subject to them--had therefore,
also, passed through the successive phases of individual growth. He had
been inspired as dramatic poet by the one avowed conviction that little
else is worth study but the history of a soul; and outward act or
circumstance had only entered into his creations as condition or
incident of the given psychological state. His dramatic imagination
had first, however unconsciously, sought its materials in himself; then
gradually been projected into the world of men and women, which his
widening knowledge laid open to him; it is scarcely necessary to say
that its power was only fully revealed when it left the remote regions
of poetical and metaphysical self-consciousness, to invoke the not less
mysterious and far more searching utterance of the general human heart.
It was a matter of course that in this expression of his dramatic
genius, the intellectual and emotional should exhibit the varying
relations which are developed by the natural life: that feeling should
begin by doing the work of thought, as in 'Saul', and thought end by
doing the work of feeling, as in 'Fifine at the Fair'; and that the two
should alternate or combine in proportioned intensity in such works of
an intermediate period as 'Cleon', 'A Death in the Desert', the 'Epistle
of Karshish', and 'James Lee's Wife'; the sophistical ingenuities of
'Bishop Blougram', and 'Sludge'; and the sad, appealing tenderness of
'Andrea del Sarto' and 'The Worst of It'.

It was also almost inevitable that so vigorous a genius should sometimes
falsify calculations based on the normal life. The long-continued
force and freshness of Mr. Browning's general faculties was in itself
a protest against them. We saw without surprise that du