FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 112:  See Morley’s “Life of Gladstone,” vol. iii. p. 417.]

[Footnote 113:  Pages 46, 47 of the first edition.]

[Footnote 114:  Pages 58-60.]

[Footnote 115:  It may here be noted that Dante Rossetti in a morbid mood supposed that certain passages of Fifine were directed against himself; and so ceased his friendship with Browning.]

[Footnote 116:  Fanny Kemble also derived from the story of Lord De Ros the subject of her “English Tragedy.”]

[Footnote 117:  Some sentences in what follows are taken from a notice of the volume which I wrote on its appearance for The Academy.]

[Footnote 118:  See Browning’s letter to Mr Kingsland in “Robert Browning” by W. G. Kingsland (1890), pp. 32, 33.]

Chapter XV

Solitude and Society

The volume which consists of La Saisiaz and The Two Poets of Croisic (1878) brings the work of this decade to a close.[119] La Saisiaz, the record of thoughts that were awakened during that solitary clamber to the summit of Saleve after the death of Miss Egerton-Smith, is not an elegy, but it remains with us as a memorial of friendship.  In reading it we discern the tall white figure of the “stranger lady,” leaning through the terrace wreaths of leaf and bloom, or pacing that low grass-path which she had loved and called her own.  It serves Browning’s purpose in the poem that she should have been one of those persons who in this world have not manifested all that lies within them.  Does she still exist, or is she now no more than the thing which lies in the little enclosure at Collonge?  The poem after its solemn and impressive prelude becomes the record of an hour’s debate of the writer with himself—­a debate which has a definite aim and is brought to a definite issue.  In conducting that debate on immortality, Browning is neither Christian nor anti-Christian.  The Christian creed involves a question of history; he cannot here admit historical considerations; he will see the matter out as he is an individual soul, on the grounds suggested by his individual consciousness and his personal knowledge.  It may be that any result he arrives at is a result for himself alone.

But why conduct an argument in verse?  Is not prose a fitter medium for such a discussion?  The answer is that the poem is more than an argument; it is the record in verse of an experience, the story of a pregnant and passionate hour, during which passion quickened the intellect; and the head, while resisting all illusions of the heart, was roused to that resistance by the heart itself.  Such an hour is full of events; it may be almost epic in its plenitude of action; but the events are ideas.  The frame and setting of the discussion also are more than frame and setting; they co-operate with the thoughts; they form part of the experience.  The poet is alone among the mountains, with dawn and sunset for associates, Jura thrilled to gold at sunrise, Saleve in its evening rose-bloom, Mont-Blanc which strikes greatness small; or at night he is beneath the luminous worlds which