name for “poetry and thought” or “singing and sermonizing"), but because he eloped with the best known literary woman in England, Elizabeth Barrett, whose fame was for many years, both before and after her marriage, much greater than Browning’s, and who was at first considered superior to Tennyson.  Thereafter, until his own work compelled attention, he was known chiefly as the man who married Elizabeth Barrett.  For years this lady had been an almost helpless invalid, and it seemed a quixotic thing when Browning, having failed to gain her family’s consent to the marriage, carried her off romantically.  Love and Italy proved better than her physicians, and for fifteen years Browning and his wife lived an ideally happy life in Pisa and in Florence.  The exquisite romance of their love is preserved in Mrs. Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, and in the volume of Letters recently published,—­wonderful letters, but so tender and intimate that it seems almost a sacrilege for inquisitive eyes to read them.

Mrs. Browning died in Florence in 1861.  The loss seemed at first too much to bear, and Browning fled with his son to England.  For the remainder of his life he lived alternately in London and in various parts of Italy, especially at the Palazzo Rezzonico, in Venice, which is now an object of pilgrimage to almost every tourist who visits the beautiful city.  Wherever he went he mingled with men and women, sociable, well dressed, courteous, loving crowds and popular applause, the very reverse of his friend Tennyson.  His earlier work had been much better appreciated in America than in England; but with the publication of The Ring and the Book, in 1868, he was at last recognized by his countrymen as one of the greatest of English poets.  He died in Venice, on December 12, 1889, the same day that saw the publication of his last work, Asolando.  Though Italy offered him an honored resting place, England claimed him for her own, and he lies buried beside Tennyson in Westminster Abbey.  The spirit of his whole life is magnificently expressed in his own lines, in the Epilogue of his last book: 

One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, tho’ right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.

WORKS.  A glance at even the titles which Browning gave to his best known volumes—­Dramatic Lyrics (1842), Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), Men and Women (1853), Dramatis Persona (1864)—­will suggest how strong the dramatic element is in all his work.  Indeed, all his poems may be divided into three classes,—­pure dramas, like Strafford and A Blot in the ’Scutcheon; dramatic narratives, like Pippa Passes, which are dramatic in form, but were not meant to be acted; and dramatic lyrics, like The Last Ride Together, which are short poems expressing some strong personal emotion, or describing some dramatic episode in human life, and in which the hero himself generally tells the story.