[Footnote 136:  So described by Mrs Bronson.]

[Footnote 137:  To Dr Furnivall, Oct. 11, 1881.]

[Footnote 138:  Quoted by Mrs Bronson.]

[Footnote 139:  Mrs Orr, “Life of Browning,” p. 400.]

[Footnote 140:  Mrs Bronson records this.]

Chapter XVI

Poet and Teacher in Old Age

During the last decade of his life Browning’s influence as a literary power was assured.  The publication indeed of The Ring and the Book in 1868 did much to establish his reputation with those readers who are not watchers for a new planet but revise their astronomical charts upon authority.  He noted with satisfaction that fourteen hundred copies of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau were sold in five days, and says of Balaustion’s Adventure “2500 in five months is a good sale for the likes of me.”  The later volumes were not perhaps more popular, but they sent readers to the earlier poems, and successive volumes of Selections made these easily accessible.  That published by Moxon in 1865, and dedicated in words of admiration and friendship to Tennyson, by no means equalled in value the earlier Selections made by John Forster.  The volume of 1872—­dedicated also to Tennyson—­which has been frequently reprinted, was arranged upon a principle, the reference of which to the poems chosen is far from clear—­“by simply stringing together certain pieces”; Browning wrote, “on the thread of an imaginary personality, I present them in succession, rather as the natural development of a particular experience than because I account them the most noteworthy portion of my work.”  We can perceive that some poems of love are brought together, and some of art, and that the series closes with poems of religious thought or experience, but such an order is not strictly observed, and the “imaginary personality”—­the thread—­seems to be imaginary in the fullest sense of the word.  Yet it is of interest to observe that something of a psychological-dramatic arrangement was at least designed.  A second series of Selections followed in 1880.  Browning was accepted by many admirers not only as a poet but as a prophet.  “Tennyson and I seem now to be regarded as the two kings of Brentford,” he said laughingly in 1879.[141] The later-enthroned king was soon to have an interesting court.  In 1881 The Browning Society, founded by Dr Furnivall—­initiator of so much work that is invaluable to the student of our literature—­and Miss E.H.  Hickey, herself a poet, began its course.  At first, according to Mrs Orr, Browning “treated the project as a joke,” but when once he understood it to be serious, “he did not oppose it.”  He felt, however, that before the public he must stand aloof from its work:  “as Wilkes was no Wilkeite,” he wrote to Edmund Yates, “I am quite other than a Browningite.”  With a little nervousness as to the discretion which the Society might or might not show, he felt grateful