before the
tragic close of his married life, and written during the first desolate
years of bereavement, it is, more than any other of his greater poems,
pervaded by his wife's spirit, a crowning monument to his Lyric Love.
But it is also the last upon which her spirit left any notable trace.
With his usual extraordinary recuperative power, Browning re-moulded the
mental universe which her love had seemed to complete, and her death
momentarily to shatter, into a new, lesser completeness. He lived in the
world, and frankly "liked earth's way," enjoying the new gifts of
friendship and of fame which the years brought in rich measure. The
little knot of critics whose praise even of _Men and Women_ and
_Dramatis Personae_; had been little more than a cry in the wilderness,
found their voices lost in the chorus of admiration which welcomed the
story of Pompilia. Some stout recalcitrants, it is true, like Edward
FitzGerald, held their ground. And while the tone of even hostile
criticism became respectful, enough of it remained to provide objects,
seven years later, for the uproarious chaff of _Pacchiarotto_.

From 1869 to 1871 Browning published nothing, and he appears also to
have written nothing beyond a sonnet commemorating Helen, the mother of
Lord Dufferin (dated April 26, 1870), almost the only set of fourteen
lines in his works of which not one proclaims his authorship. But the
decade which followed was more prolific than any other ten years of his
life. Between 1871 and 1878 nine volumes in swift succession allured,
provoked, or bewildered the reading world. Everything was now planned on
a larger scale; the vast compass and boundless volubility of _The Ring
and the Book_ became normal. He gave free rein to his delight in
intricate involutions of plot and of argument; the dramatic monologue
grew into novels in verse like _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_ and _The
Inn Album_; and the "special pleaders," Hohenstiel and Juan, expounded
their cases with a complexity of apparatus unapproached even by Sludge.
A certain relaxation of poetic nerve is on the whole everywhere
apparent, notwithstanding the prodigal display of crude intellectual
power. His poetic alchemy is less potent, the ore of sordid fact remains
sordid still. Not that his high spirituality is insecure, his heroic
idealism dimmed; but they coalesce less intimately with the alert wit
and busy intelligence of the mere "clever man," and seek their nutriment
and mater