ond--fresh-swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book
upon the table. Mr Browning told us it was the only book he had with
him. The bedrooms were as bare as the sitting-room, but I remember a
little dumb piano standing in a corner, on which he used to practise in
the early morning. I heard Mr Browning declare they were perfectly
satisfied with their little house; that his brains, squeezed as dry as a
sponge, were only ready for fresh air."[106] Perhaps Browning's "only
book" of 1872 contained the dramas of AEschylus, for at Fontainebleau
where he spent some later weeks of the year these were the special
subject of his study. It was at Saint-Aubin in 1872 that he found the
materials for his poem of the following year, and to Miss Thackeray's
drowsy name for the district,

Symbolic of the place and people too,

_White Cotton Night-Cap Country_, the suggestion of Browning's title
_Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ is due. To her the poem is dedicated.

Browning's interest in those who were rendered homeless and destitute in
France during the Prussian invasion was shown in a practical way in the
spring of 1871. He had for long been averse to the publication of his
poems in magazines and reviews. In 1864 he had gratified his American
admirers by allowing _Gold Hair_ and _Prospice_ to appear in the
_Atlantic Monthly_ previous to their inclusion in _Dramatis Persona._ A
fine sonnet written in 1870, suggested by the tower erected at
Clandeboye by Lord Dufferin in memory of his mother, Helen, Countess of
Gifford, had been inserted in some undistributed copies of a pamphlet,
"Helen's Tower," privately printed twenty years previously; the sonnet
was published at the close of 1883 in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, but was
not given a place by Browning in the collected editions of his Poetical
Works. In general he felt that the miscellaneous contents of a magazine,
surrounding a poem, formed hardly an appropriate setting for such verse
as his. In February 1871, however, he offered to his friend and,
publisher Mr Smith the ballad of _Herve Riel_ for use in the _Cornhill
Magazine_ of March, venturing for once, as he says, to puff his wares
and call the verses good. His purpose was to send something to the
distressed people of Paris, and one hundred guineas, the sum liberally
fixed by Mr Smith as the price of the poem, were duly forwarded--the
gift of the English poet and his Breton hero. The facts of the story had
been forgot