e were seldom visible
except on Sunday; there were solitary walks of miles to be had along the
coast; fruit and milk, butter and eggs in abundance, and these were
Browning's diet. "I feel out of the very earth sometimes," he wrote, "as
I sit here at the window.... Such a soft sea, and such a mournful wind!"
But the lulling charm of the place which, though so different, brought
back the old Siena mood, did not convert him into an idler. The
mornings, which began betimes, were given to work; in his way of
desperate resolve to be well occupied he informs Miss Blagden (Aug. 18,
1863) that having yesterday written a poem of 120 lines, he means to
keep writing whether he likes it or not.[89]

"With the spring of 1863," writes Mr Gosse, "a great change came over
Browning's habits. He had refused all invitations into society; but now,
of evenings, after he had put his boy to bed, the solitude weighed
intolerably upon him. He told the present writer [Mr Gosse] long
afterwards, that it suddenly occurred to him on one such spring night in
1863 that this mode of life was morbid and unworthy, and, then and
there, he determined to accept for the future every suitable invitation
which came to him." "Accordingly," goes on Mr Gosse, "he began to dine
out, and in the process of time he grew to be one of the most familiar
figures of the age at every dinner-table, concert-hall, and place of
refined entertainment in London. This, however, was a slow process." Mrs
Ritchie refers to spoken words of Browning which declared that it was
"a mere chance whether he should live in the London house that he had
taken and join in social life, or go away to some quiet retreat, and be
seen no more." It was in a modified form the story of the "fervid youth
grown man," in his own "Daniel Bartoli," who in his desolation, after
the death of his lady,

Trembled on the verge
Of monkhood: trick of cowl and taste of scourge
He tried: then, kicked not at the pricks perverse,
But took again, for better or for worse,
The old way of the world, and, much the same
Man o' the outside, fairly played life's game.

Probably Browning had come to understand that in his relation to the
past he was not more loyal in solitude than he might be in society; it
was indeed the manlier loyalty to bear his full part in life. And as to
his art, he felt that, with sufficient leisure to encounter the labour
he had enjoined upon himself, it mattered little wh