ley's "Life of Gladstone," vol. iii. p. 417.]

[Footnote 113: Pages 46, 47 of the first edition.]

[Footnote 114: Pages 58-60.]

[Footnote 115: It may here be noted that Dante Rossetti in a morbid mood
supposed that certain passages of _Fifine_ were directed against
himself; and so ceased his friendship with Browning.]

[Footnote 116: Fanny Kemble also derived from the story of Lord De Ros
the subject of her "English Tragedy."]

[Footnote 117: Some sentences in what follows are taken from a notice of
the volume which I wrote on its appearance for _The Academy_.]

[Footnote 118: See Browning's letter to Mr Kingsland in "Robert
Browning" by W. G. Kingsland (1890), pp. 32, 33.]

Chapter XV

Solitude and Society

The volume which consists of _La Saisiaz_ and _The Two Poets of Croisic_
(1878) brings the work of this decade to a close.[119] _La Saisiaz_, the
record of thoughts that were awakened during that solitary clamber to
the summit of Saleve after the death of Miss Egerton-Smith, is not an
elegy, but it remains with us as a memorial of friendship. In reading it
we discern the tall white figure of the "stranger lady," leaning through
the terrace wreaths of leaf and bloom, or pacing that low grass-path
which she had loved and called her own. It serves Browning's purpose in
the poem that she should have been one of those persons who in this
world have not manifested all that lies within them. Does she still
exist, or is she now no more than the thing which lies in the little
enclosure at Collonge? The poem after its solemn and impressive prelude
becomes the record of an hour's debate of the writer with himself--a
debate which has a definite aim and is brought to a definite issue. In
conducting that debate on immortality, Browning is neither Christian nor
anti-Christian. The Christian creed involves a question of history; he
cannot here admit historical considerations; he will see the matter out
as he is an individual soul, on the grounds suggested by his individual
consciousness and his personal knowledge. It may be that any result he
arrives at is a result for himself alone.

But why conduct an argument in verse? Is not prose a fitter medium for
such a discussion? The answer is that the poem is more than an argument;
it is the record in verse of an experience, the story of a pregnant and
passionate hour, during which passion quickened the intellect; and the
head, while resisting all illusions of the hea