The spring and summer of 1877 were not productive.  The summer holiday was spent in a new haunt among the Savoy Alps, and Browning missed the familiar stimulus of the sea-air.  But the early autumn brought an event which abruptly shattered his quiescence, and called forth, presently, the most intimately personal poem of his later years.  Miss Ann Egerton-Smith, his gifted and congenial companion at London concerts, and now, for the fourth year in succession, in the summer villeggiatura, died suddenly of heart disease at dawn on Sept. 14, as she was preparing for a mountain expedition with her friends.  It was not one of those losses which stifle thought or sweep it along on the vehement tide of lyric utterance; it was rather of the kind which set it free, creating an atmosphere of luminous serenity about it, and allaying all meaner allurements and distractions.  Elegy is often the outcome of such moods; and the elegiac note is perceptible in the grave music of La Saisiaz.  Yet the poem as a whole does not even distantly recall, save in the quiet intensity of its ground tone, the noble poems in which Milton or Shelley, Arnold or Tennyson, commemorated their dead friends.  He himself commemorated no other dead friend in a way like this; to his wife’s memory he had given only the sacred silence, the impassioned hymn, the wealth of poetry inspired by her spirit but not addressed to her.  This poem, also, was written “once, and only once, and for one only.” La Saisiaz recalls to us, perversely perhaps, poems of his in which no personal sorrow beats.  The glory of the dawn and the mountain-peak—­Saleve with its outlook over the snowy splendour of Mont Blanc—­instils itself here into the mourner’s mood, as, long before, a like scene had animated the young disciples of the Grammarian; while the “cold music” of Galuppi’s Toccata seems to be echoed inauspiciously in these lingering trochaics.  Something of both moods survives, but the dominant tone is a somewhat grey and tempered hope, remote indeed from the oppressive sense of evanescence, the crumbling mortality, of the second poem, remote no less from the hushed exaltation, the subdued but rapturous confidence of the first.

The poet is growing old; the unity of poetic vision is breaking up into conflicting aspects only to be adjusted in the give and take of debate; he puts off his singing robes to preside as moderator, while Fancy and Reason exchange thrust and parry on the problem of immortality; delivering at last, as the “sad summing up of all,” a balanced and tentative affirmation.  And he delivers the decision with an oppressive sense that it is but his own.  He is “Athanasius contra mundum”; and he dwells, with a “pallid smile” which Athanasius did not inspire, upon the marvellous power of fame.  Nay, Athanasius himself has his doubts.  Even his sober hope is not a secure possession; but in the gloom of London’s November he remembers that he had hoped in the sunset glory of Saleve, and “saves up” the memory of that pregnant hour for succour in less prosperous times.