“With the spring of 1863,” writes Mr Gosse, “a great change came over Browning’s habits.  He had refused all invitations into society; but now, of evenings, after he had put his boy to bed, the solitude weighed intolerably upon him.  He told the present writer [Mr Gosse] long afterwards, that it suddenly occurred to him on one such spring night in 1863 that this mode of life was morbid and unworthy, and, then and there, he determined to accept for the future every suitable invitation which came to him.”  “Accordingly,” goes on Mr Gosse, “he began to dine out, and in the process of time he grew to be one of the most familiar figures of the age at every dinner-table, concert-hall, and place of refined entertainment in London.  This, however, was a slow process.”  Mrs Ritchie refers to spoken words of Browning which declared that it was “a mere chance whether he should live in the London house that he had taken and join in social life, or go away to some quiet retreat, and be seen no more.”  It was in a modified form the story of the “fervid youth grown man,” in his own “Daniel Bartoli,” who in his desolation, after the death of his lady,

     Trembled on the verge
    Of monkhood:  trick of cowl and taste of scourge
    He tried:  then, kicked not at the pricks perverse,
    But took again, for better or for worse,
    The old way of the world, and, much the same
    Man o’ the outside, fairly played life’s game.

Probably Browning had come to understand that in his relation to the past he was not more loyal in solitude than he might be in society; it was indeed the manlier loyalty to bear his full part in life.  And as to his art, he felt that, with sufficient leisure to encounter the labour he had enjoined upon himself, it mattered little whether the remaining time was spent in a cave or in a court; strength may encounter the seductions either of the hermitage or of the crowd and still be the victor: 

    Strength may conclude in Archelaos’ court,
    And yet esteem the silken company
    So much sky-scud, sea-froth, earth-thistledown,
    For aught their praise or blame should joy or grieve. 
    Strength amid crowds as late in solitude
    May lead the still life, ply the wordless task.[90]

One cannot prescribe a hygiene to poets; the poet of passionate contemplation, such as was Wordsworth, could hardly quicken or develop his peculiar faculty by devotion to the entertainments of successive London seasons.  And perhaps it is not certain that the genius of Browning was wholly a gainer by the superficial excitations of the dinner table and the reception room.  But the truth is, as Mrs Browning had observed, that his energy was not exhausted by literary work, and that it preyed upon himself if no means of escape were found.  If he was not at the piano, or shaping clay, or at the drawing-board, or walking fast and far, inward disturbances were set up which rent and frayed his mind.  The pleasures of society both fatigued and rested Browning; they certainly relieved him from the troubles of super-abundant force.