Other changes sadder than the loss of old Norman pillars and ornaments, or new barbarous structures, run up beside Poggio, were happening.  In May 1866 Browning’s father, kind and cheery old man, was unwell; in June Miss Browning telegraphed for her brother, and he arrived in Paris twenty-four hours before the end.  The elder Browning had almost completed his eighty-fifth year.  To the last he retained what his son described as “his own strange sweetness of soul.”  It was the close of a useful, unworldly, unambitious life, full of innocent enjoyment and deep affection.  The occasion was not one for intemperate grief, but the sense of loss was great.  Miss Browning, whose devotion during many years first to her mother, then to her widowed father, had been entire, now became her brother’s constant companion.  They rested for the summer at Le Croisic, a little town in Brittany, in a delightfully spacious old house, with the sea to right and left, through whose great rushing waves Browning loved to battle, and, inland, a wild country, picturesque with its flap-hatted, white-clad, baggy-breeched villagers.  Their enjoyment was unspoilt even by some weeks of disagreeable weather, and to the same place, which Browning has described in his Two Poets of Croisic—­

    Croisic, the spit of sandy rock which juts
     Spitefully north,

they returned in the following summer.  During this second visit (September 1867) that most spirited ballad of French heroism, Herve Riel, was written, though its publication belongs to four years later.[94]

In June 1868 came grief of a kind that seemed to cut him off from outward communication with a portion of what was most precious in his past life.  Arabel Barrett, his wife’s only surviving sister, who had supported him in his greatest sorrow, died in Browning’s arms.  “For many years,” we are told by Mr Gosse, “he was careful never to pass her house in Delamere Terrace.”  Although not prone to superstition, he had noted in July 1863 a dream of Miss Barrett in which she imagined herself asking her dead sister Elizabeth, “When shall I be with you?” and received the answer, “Dearest, in five years.”  “Only a coincidence,” he adds in a letter to Miss Blagden, “but noticeable.”  That summer, after wanderings in France, Browning and his sister settled at Audierne, on the extreme westerly point of Brittany, “a delightful, quite unspoiled little fishing town,” with the ocean in front and green lanes and hills behind.  It was in every way an eventful year.  In the autumn his new publishers, Smith, Elder & Co., produced the six-volume edition of his Poetical Works, on the title-page of which the author describes himself as “Robert Browning, M.A., Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.”  The distinction, partly due to Jowett’s influence, had been conferred a year previously.  In 1865, Browning, who desired that his son should be educated at Oxford, first became acquainted with Jowett.