"

The last ten or twelve years of Browning's life were so crowded with
interests, occupations, publications, friends, honors, that not even a
summary of them can be undertaken here. Mr. Sharp says of this period:

"Everybody wished him to come and dine; and he did his best to gratify
Everybody. He saw everything; read all the notable books; kept himself
acquainted with the leading contents of the journals and magazines;
conducted a large correspondence; read new French, German, and Italian
books of mark; read and translated Euripides and AEschylus; knew all the
gossip of the literary clubs, the salons, and the studios; was a
frequenter of afternoon tea parties; and then, over and above it, he was
Browning--the most profoundly subtle mind that has exercised itself in
poetry since Shakespeare."

Mr. Henry James in commenting on Browning's rich and ample London period
with "its felicities and prosperities of every sort," says that in
contemplating "the wonderful Browning ... the accomplished, saturated,
sane, sound man of the London world and the world of culture," it was
impossible not to believe that "he had arrived somehow, for his own deep
purposes, at the enjoyment of a double identity," so dissociated were
the poet and the "member of society." Phillips Brooks, who met Browning
in England in 1865-6, was impressed by his fullness of life and said he
was "very like some of the best of Thackeray's London men." In public
and on ordinary social occasions Browning is said to have been frank,
charming, friendly--"more agreeable," Mary Anderson said, "than
distinguished." With intimate friends, however, the poet had quite
another sort of charm. "To a single listener," says Mr. Gosse, with whom
he was on familiar terms, "the Browning of his own study was to the
Browning of a dinner party as a tiger cat is to a domestic cat. In such
conversation his natural strength came out. His talk assumed the volume
and the tumult of a cascade. His voice rose to a shout, sank to a
whisper, ran up and down the gamut of conversational melody. Those whom
he was expecting will never forget his welcome, the loud trumpet-note
from the other end of the passage, the talk already in full flood at a
distance of twenty feet. Then, in his own study or drawing-room, what he
loved was to capture his visitor in a low armchair's 'sofa-lap of
leather,' and from a most unfair vantage of height to tyrannize, to walk
around the victim, in front, behind, on