Spring came out and found them still in Paris, Mrs. Browning enthusiastic about Napoleon III. and interested in spiritualism:  her husband serenely sceptical concerning both.  In the summer they again went to London:  but they appear to have seen more of Kenyon and other intimate friends than to have led a busy social life.  Kenyon’s friendship and good company never ceased to have a charm for both poets.  Mrs. Browning loved him almost as a brother:  her husband told Bayard Taylor, on the day when that good poet and charming man called upon them, and after another visitor had departed—­a man with a large rosy face and rotund body, as Taylor describes him—­“there goes one of the most splendid men living—­a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to be known all over the world as Kenyon the Magnificent.”

In the early autumn a sudden move towards Italy was again made, and after a few weeks in Paris and on the way the Brownings found themselves at home once more in Casa Guidi.

But before this, probably indeed before they had left Paris for London, Mr. Moxon had published the now notorious Shelley forgeries.  These were twenty-five spurious letters, but so cleverly manufactured that they at first deceived many people.  In the preceding November Browning had been asked to write an introduction to them.  This he had gladly agreed to do, eager as he was for a suitable opportunity of expressing his admiration for Shelley.  When the letters reached him, he found that, genuine or not, though he never suspected they were forgeries, they contained nothing of particular import, nothing that afforded a just basis for what he had intended to say.  Pledged as he was, however, to write something for Mr. Moxon’s edition of the Letters, he set about the composition of an Essay, of a general as much as of an individual nature.  This he wrote in Paris, and finished by the beginning of December.  It dealt with the objective and subjective poet; on the relation of the latter’s life to his work; and upon Shelley in the light of his nature, art, and character.  Apart from the circumstance that it is the only independent prose writing of any length from Browning’s pen, this is an exceptionally able and interesting production.

Dr. Furnivall deserves general gratitude for his obtaining the author’s leave to re-issue it, and for having published it as one of the papers of the Browning Society.  As that enthusiastic student and good friend of the poet says in his “foretalk” to the reprint, the essay is noteworthy, not merely as a signal service to Shelley’s fame and memory, but for Browning’s statement of his own aim in his own work, both as objective and subjective poet.  The same clear-sightedness and impartial sympathy, which are such distinguishing characteristics of his dramatic studies of human thought and emotion, are obvious in Browning’s Shelley essay.  “It would be idle to enquire,” he writes,