look cool and deep, the green trees used to shade the Crescent.... The
house was an ordinary London house, but the carved oak furniture and
tapestries gave dignity to the long drawing-rooms, and pictures and
books lined the stairs. In the garden at the back dwelt, at the time of
which I am writing, two weird gray geese, with quivering silver wings
and long throats, who used to come and meet their master hissing and
fluttering." In 1866 an owl--for Browning still indulged a fantasy of
his own in the choice of pets--was "the light of our house," as a letter
describes this bird of darkness, "for his tameness and engaging ways."
The bird would kiss its master on the face, tweak his hair, and if one
said "Poor old fellow!" in a commiserating voice would assume a
sympathetic air of depression.[86] Miss Barrett lived hard by, in
Delamere Terrace. With her on Sundays Browning listened at Bedford
Chapel to the sermons of a non-conformist preacher, Thomas Jones, to
some of which when published in 1884, he prefixed an introduction. "The
Welsh poet-preacher" was a man of humble origin possessed of a natural
gift of eloquence, which, with his "liberal humanity," drew Browning to
become a hearer of his discourses.

He made no haste to give the public a new volume of verse. Mrs Browning
had mentioned to a correspondent, not long before her death, that her
husband had then a considerable body of lyrical poetry in a state of
completion. An invitation to accept the editorship of the _Cornhill
Magazine_, on Thackeray's retirement, was after some hesitation
declined. He was now partly occupied with preparing for the press
whatever writings by his wife seemed suitable for publication. In 1862
he issued with a dedication "to grateful Florence" her _Last Poems_; in
1863, her _Greek Christian Poets_; in 1865 he prepared a volume of
Selections from her poems, and had the happiness of knowing that the
number of her readers had rather increased than diminished. The efforts
of self-constituted biographers to make capital out of the incidents of
her life, and to publish such letters of hers as could be laid hands on,
moved him to transports of indignation, which break forth in a letter to
his friend Miss Blagden with unmeasured violence: what he felt with the
"paws" of these blackguards in his "very bowels" God knows; beast and
scamp and knave and fool are terms hardly strong enough to relieve his
wrath. Such sudden whirls of extreme rage were rare,