orld:
May be! flower that's full-blown tempts the butterfly, not flower that's furled.
But more learned sense unlocked you, loosed the sheath and let expand
Bud to bell and out-spread flower-shape at the least warm touch of hand
--Maybe throb of heart, beneath which,--quickening farther than it knew,--
Treasure oft was disembosomed, scent all strange and unguessed hue.
Disembosomed, re-embosomed,--must one memory suffice,
Prove I knew an Alpine rose which all beside named Edelweiss?

Miss Egerton-Smith was the companion and house-mate of Browning and his
sister in their various summer wanderings from 1874 to 1877. In the
first of these years the three friends occupied a house facing the sea
at the village of Mers near Treport. Browning at this time was much
absorbed by his _Aristophanes' Apology_. "Here," writes Mrs Orr, "with
uninterrupted quiet, and in a room devoted to his use, Mr Browning would
work till the afternoon was advanced, and then set off on a long walk
over the cliffs, often in the face of a wind, which, as he wrote of it
at the time, he could lean against as if it were a wall." The following
summers were spent at Villers in Normandy (1875), at the Isle of Arran
(1876), and in the upland country of the Saleve, near Geneva. During the
visit to the Saleve district, where Browning and his sister with Miss
Egerton-Smith occupied a chalet named La Saisiaz, he was, Mrs Orr tells
us, "unusually depressed and unusually disposed to regard the absence
from home as a banishment." Yet the place seemed lovely to him in its
solitude and its beauty; the prospect of Geneva, with lake and plain
extended below, varying in appearance with the shifting of clouds, was
repose to his sense of sight. He bathed twice each day in the mountain
stream--"a marvel of delicate delight framed in with trees." He read and
rested; and wrote but little or not at all. Suddenly the repose of La
Saisiaz was broken up; the mood of languorous pleasure and drowsy
discontent was at an end. While preparing to join her friend on a
long-intended mountain climb Miss Egerton-Smith, with no forewarning,
died. The shock was for a time overwhelming. When Browning returned to
London the poem _La Saisiaz_, the record of his inquisition into the
mystery of death, of his inward debate concerning a future life, was
written. It was the effort of resilience in his spirit in opposition to
that stroke which deprived him of the friend who