“I love thee to the level of every day’s
   Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight,
   I love thee freely, as men strive for right;
   I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. 
   I love thee with the passion put to use
   In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith. 
   I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
   With my lost saints—­I love thee with the breath,
   Smiles, tears, of all my life!—­and, if God choose,
   I shall but love thee better after death.”

After fifteen years of happy married life, she died in 1861, and was buried in Florence.  When thinking of her, Browning wrote his poem Prospice (1861) welcoming death as—­

“...a peace out of pain, Then a light, then thy breast, O thou soul of my soul!  I shall clasp thee again, And with God be the rest.”

His Later Years.—­Soon after his wife’s death, he began his long poem of over twenty thousand lines, The Ring and the Book.  He continued to write verse to the year of his death.

In 1881 the Browning Society was founded for the study and discussion of his works,—­a most unusual honor for a poet during his lifetime.  The leading universities gave him honorary degrees, he was elected life-governor of London University, and was tendered the rectorship of the Universities of Glasgow and St. Andrew’s and the presidency of the Wordsworth Society.

During the latter part of his life, he divided most of his time between London and Italy.  When he died, in 1889, he was living with his son, Robert Barrett Browning, in the Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice.  Over his grave in Westminster Abbey was chanted Mrs. Browning’s touching lyric:—­

  “He giveth his beloved, sleep.”

Dramatic Monologues.—­Browning was a poet of great productivity.  From the publication of Pauline in 1833 to Asolando in 1889, there were only short pauses between the appearances of his works.  Unlike Tennyson, Browning could not stop to revise and recast; but he constantly sought expression, in narratives, dramas, lyrics, and monologues, for new thoughts and feelings.

The study of the human soul held an unfailing charm for Browning.  He analyzes with marked keenness and subtlety the experiences of the soul, its sickening failures, and its eager strivings amid complex, puzzling conditions.  In nearly all his poems, whether narrative, lyric, or dramatic, the chief interest centers about some “incidents in the development of a soul.”

The poetic form that he found best adapted to “the development of a soul” was the dramatic monologue, of which he is one of the greatest masters.  Requiring but one speaker, this form narrows the interest either to the speaker or to the one described by him.  Most of his best monologues are to be found in the volumes known as Dramatic Lyrics (1842), Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), Men and Women (1855), Dramatis Personae (1864).