remains.  Mr. Browning’s material was also inadequate to his purpose, though from a different cause.  It was too hard.  It was ‘pure crude fact,’ secreted from the fluid being of the men and women whose experience it had formed.  In its existing state it would have broken up under the artistic attempt to weld and round it.  He supplied an alloy, the alloy of fancy, or—­as he also calls it—­of one fact more:  this fact being the echo of those past existences awakened within his own.  He breathed into the dead record the breath of his own life; and when his ring of evidence had re-formed, first in elastic then in solid strength, here delicately incised, there broadly stamped with human thought and passion, he could cast fancy aside, and bid his readers recognise in what he set before them unadulterated human truth.”—­Mrs. Orr.]

On the afternoon of the day on which he made his purchase he read the book from end to end.  “A Spirit laughed and leapt through every limb.”  The midsummer heats had caused thunder-clouds to congregate above Vallombrosa and the whole valley of Arno:  and the air in Florence was painfully sultry.  The poet stood by himself on his terrace at Casa Guidi, and as he watched the fireflies wandering from the enclosed gardens, and the sheet-lightnings quivering through the heated atmosphere, his mind was busy in refashioning the old tale of loveless marriage and crime.

                                            “Beneath
      I’ the street, quick shown by openings of the sky
      When flame fell silently from cloud to cloud,
      Richer than that gold snow Jove rained on Rhodes,
      The townsmen walked by twos and threes, and talked,
      Drinking the blackness in default of air—­
      A busy human sense beneath my feet: 
      While in and out the terrace-plants, and round
      One branch of tall datura, waxed and waned
      The lamp-fly lured there, wanting the white flower.”

Scene by scene was re-enacted, though of course only in certain essential details.  The final food for the imagination was found in a pamphlet of which he came into possession of in London, where several important matters were given which had no place in the volume he had picked up in Florence.

Much, far the greater part, of the first “book” is—­interesting!  It is mere verse.  As verse, even, it is often so involved, so musicless occasionally, so banal now and again, so inartistic in colour as well as in form, that one would, having apprehended its explanatory interest, pass on without regret, were it not for the noble close—­the passionate, out-welling lines to “the truest poet I have ever known,” the beautiful soul who had given her all to him, whom, but four years before he wrote these words, he had laid to rest among the cypresses and ilexes of the old Florentine garden of the dead.