In 1866 his father died in Paris, strenuous in life until the very end.  After this event Miss Sarianna Browning went to reside with her brother, and from that time onward was his inseparable companion, and ever one of the dearest and most helpful of friends.  In latter years brother and sister were constantly seen together, and so regular attendants were they at such functions as the “Private Views” at the Royal Academy and Grosvenor Gallery, that these never seemed complete without them.  A Private View, a first appearance of Joachim or Sarasate, a first concert of Richter or Henschel or Halle, at each of these, almost to a certainty, the poet was sure to appear.  The chief personal happiness of his later life was in his son.  Mr. R. Barrett Browning is so well known as a painter and sculptor that it would be superfluous for me to add anything further here, except to state that his successes were his father’s keenest pleasures.

Two years after his father’s death, that is in 1868, the “Poetical Works of Robert Browning, M.A., Honorary Fellow of Baliol College, Oxford,” were issued in six volumes.  Here the equator of Browning’s genius may be drawn.  On the further side lie the “Men and Women” of the period anterior to “The Ring and the Book”:  midway is the transitional zone itself:  on the hither side are the “Men and Women” of a more temperate if not colder clime.

The first part of “The Ring and the Book” was not published till November.  In September the poet was staying with his sister and son at Le Croisic, a picturesque village at the mouth of the Loire, at the end of the great salt plains which stretch down from Guerande to the Bay of Biscay.  No doubt, in lying on the sand-dunes in the golden September glow, in looking upon the there somewhat turbid current of the Loire, the poet brooded on those days when he saw its inland waters with her who was with him no longer save in dreams and memories.  Here he wrote that stirring poem, “Herve Riel,” founded upon the valorous action of a French sailor who frustrated the naval might of England, and claimed nothing as a reward save permission to have a holiday on land to spend a few hours with his wife, “la belle Aurore.”  “Herve Riel” (which has been translated into French, and is often recited, particularly in the maritime towns, and is always evocative of enthusiastic applause) is one of Browning’s finest action-lyrics, and is assured of the same immortality as “How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” or the “Pied Piper” himself.

In 1872 there was practical proof of the poet’s growing popularity.  Baron Tauchnitz issued two volumes of excellently selected poems, comprising some of the best of “Men and Women,” “Dramatis Personae,” and “Dramatic Romances,” besides the longer “Soul’s Tragedy,” “Luria,” “In a Balcony,” and “Christmas Eve and Easter Day”—­the most Christian poem of the century, according to one eminent cleric, the heterodox self-sophistication