Miss Egerton-Smith was the companion and house-mate of Browning and his sister in their various summer wanderings from 1874 to 1877.  In the first of these years the three friends occupied a house facing the sea at the village of Mers near Treport.  Browning at this time was much absorbed by his Aristophanes’ Apology.  “Here,” writes Mrs Orr, “with uninterrupted quiet, and in a room devoted to his use, Mr Browning would work till the afternoon was advanced, and then set off on a long walk over the cliffs, often in the face of a wind, which, as he wrote of it at the time, he could lean against as if it were a wall.”  The following summers were spent at Villers in Normandy (1875), at the Isle of Arran (1876), and in the upland country of the Saleve, near Geneva.  During the visit to the Saleve district, where Browning and his sister with Miss Egerton-Smith occupied a chalet named La Saisiaz, he was, Mrs Orr tells us, “unusually depressed and unusually disposed to regard the absence from home as a banishment.”  Yet the place seemed lovely to him in its solitude and its beauty; the prospect of Geneva, with lake and plain extended below, varying in appearance with the shifting of clouds, was repose to his sense of sight.  He bathed twice each day in the mountain stream—­“a marvel of delicate delight framed in with trees.”  He read and rested; and wrote but little or not at all.  Suddenly the repose of La Saisiaz was broken up; the mood of languorous pleasure and drowsy discontent was at an end.  While preparing to join her friend on a long-intended mountain climb Miss Egerton-Smith, with no forewarning, died.  The shock was for a time overwhelming.  When Browning returned to London the poem La Saisiaz, the record of his inquisition into the mystery of death, of his inward debate concerning a future life, was written.  It was the effort of resilience in his spirit in opposition to that stroke which deprived him of the friend who was so near and dear.

The grouping of the works produced by Browning from the date of the publication of The Ring and the Book (1868) to the publication of La Saisias (1878), which is founded upon the occasions that suggested them, has only an external and historical interest.  The studies in the Greek drama and the creations to which these gave rise extend at intervals over the whole decade. Balaustion’s Adventure was published in 1871, Aristophanes’ Apology in 1875, the translation of The Agamemnon of AEschylus in 1877.  Two of the volumes of this period, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871) and Fifine at the Fair (1872) are casuistical monologues, and these, it will be observed, lie side by side in the chronological order.  The first of the pair is concerned with public and political life, with the conduct and character of a man engaged in the affairs of state; the second, with a domestic question, the casuistry of wedded fidelity and infidelity, from which the scope of the