and then to Italy, where they lived first in Genoa and afterward in Florence, which with occasional absences was their home for fourteen years.  Mrs. Browning died there, at Casa Guidi, in June 1861.  Browning left Florence some time afterward, and in spite of his later visits to Italy, never returned there.  He lived again in London in the winter, but most of his summers were spent in France, and especially in Brittany.  About 1878 he formed the habit of going to Venice for the autumn, which continued with rare exceptions to the end of his life.  There in 1888 his son, recently married, had made his home; and there on the 12th of December, 1889, Robert Browning died.  He was buried in Westminster Abbey on the last day of the year.

[Illustration:  ROBERT BROWNING.]

‘Pauline, a Fragment of a Confession,’ Browning’s first published poem, was a psychological self-analysis, perfectly characteristic of the time of life at which he wrote it,—­very young, full of excesses of mood, of real exultation, and somewhat less real depression—­the “confession” of a poet of twenty-one, intensely interested in the ever-new discovery of his own nature, its possibilities, and its relations.  It rings very true, and has no decadent touch in it:—­

     “I am made up of an intensest life
      ... a principle of restlessness
     Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all—­”

this is the note that stays in the reader’s mind.  But the poem is psychologically rather than poetically noteworthy—­except as all beginnings are so; and Browning’s statement in a note in his collected poems that he “acknowledged and retained it with extreme repugnance,” shows how fully he recognized this.

In ‘Paracelsus,’ his next long poem, published some two years later, the strength of his later work is first definitely felt.  Taking for theme the life of the sixteenth-century physician, astrologer, alchemist, conjuror,—­compound of Faust and Cagliostro, mixture of truth-seeker, charlatan, and dreamer,—­Browning makes of it the history of the soul of a feverish aspirant after the finality of intellectual power, the knowledge which should be for man the key to the universe; the tragedy of its failure, and the greater tragedy of its discovery of the barrenness of the effort, and the omission from its scheme of life of an element without which power was impotent.

     “Yet, constituted thus and thus endowed,
     I failed; I gazed on power till I grew blind. 
     Power—­I could not take my eyes from that;
     That only I thought should be preserved, increased.

* * * * *

     I learned my own deep error:  love’s undoing
     Taught me the worth of love in man’s estate,
     And what proportion love should hold with power
     In his right constitution; love preceding
     Power, and with much power always much more love.”

‘Paracelsus’ is the work of a man still far from maturity; but it is Browning’s first use of a type of poem in which his powers were to find one of their chief manifestations—­a psychological history, told with so slight an aid from “an external machinery of incidents” (to use his own phrase), or from conventional dramatic arrangement, as to constitute a form virtually new.