But first he went to Russia, and spent some time in St. Petersburg, attracted thither by the invitation of a friend.  The country interested him, but does not seem to have deeply or permanently engaged his attention.  That, however, his Russian experiences were not fruitless is manifest from the remarkably picturesque and technically very interesting poem, “Ivan Ivanovitch” (the fourth of the Dramatic Idyls, 1879).  Of a truth, after his own race and country—­readers will at once think of “Home Thoughts from the Sea,” or the thrilling lines in “Home Thoughts from Abroad,” beginning—­

“Oh, to be in England,
Now that April’s there!”—­

or perhaps, those lines in his earliest work—­

                           “I cherish most
      My love of England—­how, her name, a word
      Of hers in a strange tongue makes my heart beat!”

—­it was of the mystic Orient or of the glowing South that he oftenest thought and dreamed.  With Heine he might have cried:  “O Firdusi!  O Ischami!  O Saadi!  How do I long after the roses of Schiraz!” As for Italy, who of all our truest poets has not loved her:  but who has worshipped her with so manly a passion, so loyal a love, as Browning?  One alone indeed may be mated with him here, she who had his heart of hearts, and who lies at rest in the old Florentine cemetery within sound of the loved waters of Arno.  Who can forget his lines in “De Gustibus,” “Open my heart and you will see, graved inside of it, Italy.”

It would be no difficult task to devote a volume larger than the present one to the descriptive analysis of none but the poems inspired by Italy, Italian personages and history, Italian Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and Music.  From Porphyria and her lover to Pompilia and all the direful Roman tragedy wherein she is as a moon of beauty above conflicting savage tides of passion, what an unparalleled gallery of portraits, what a brilliant phantasmagoria, what a movement of intensest life!

It is pleasant to know of one of them, “The Italian in England,” that Browning was proud, because Mazzini told him he had read this poem to certain of his fellow-exiles in England to show how an Englishman could sympathise with them.

After leaving Russia the young poet spent the rest of his Wanderjahr in Italy.  Among other places he visited was Asolo, that white little hill-town of the Veneto, whence he drew hints for “Sordello,” and “Pippa Passes,” and whither he returned in the last year of his life, as with unconscious significance he himself said, “on his way homeward.”