[Footnote 6:  Preface to the first edition of Strafford (subsequently omitted).]

The open-eyed man of the world and of affairs in Browning was plainly clamouring for more expression than he had yet found.  An invitation from the first actor of the day to write a tragedy for him was not likely, under these circumstances, to be declined; and during the whole winter of 1836-37 the story of Sordello remained untold, while its author plunged, with a security and relish which no one who knew only his poetry could have foretold, into the pragmatic politics and diplomatic intrigues of Strafford.  The performance of the play on May 1, 1837 introduced further distractions.  And Sordello had made little further progress, when, in the April of the following year, Browning embarked on a sudden but memorable trip to the South of Europe.  It gave him his first glimpse of Italy and of the Mediterranean, and plenty of the rough homely intercourse with men which he loved.  He travelled, in a fashion that suited his purse and his hardy nature, by a merchant vessel from London to the Adriatic.  The food was uneatable, the horrors of dirt and discomfort portentous; but he bore them cheerfully for the sake of one advantage,—­“the solitariness of the one passenger among all those rough new creatures, I like it much, and soon get deep into their friendship."[7] Grim tragedies of the high-seas, too, came within his ken.[8] Two or three moments of the voyage stand out for us with peculiar distinctness:  the gorgeous sunset off Cadiz bay, when he watched the fading outlines of Gibraltar and Cape St Vincent,—­ghostly mementos of England,—­not as Arnold’s weary Titan, but as a Herakles stretching a hand of help across the seas; the other sunset on the Mediterranean, when Etna loomed against the flaming sky;[9] and, between them, that glaring noontide on the African shore, when the “solitary passenger,” weary of shipboard and sea sickness, longed for his good horse York in the stable at home, and scribbled his ballad of brave horses, How they brought the Good News, in a blank leaf of Bartoli’s Simboli.  The voyage ended at Trieste; and thence he passed to Venice, brooded among her ruined palaces over Sordello, and “English Eyebright” and all the destiny and task of the poet; and so turned homeward, through the mountains, gathering vivid glimpses as he went of “all my places and castles,"[10] and laying by a memory, soon to germinate, of “delicious Asolo,” “palpably fire-clothed” in the glory of his young imagination.

[Footnote 7:  R.B. to E.B.B., i. 505.]

[Footnote 8:  Cf. the long letter to Miss Haworth, Orr, Life, p. 96.]

[Footnote 9:  Cf. Sordello, bk. iii., end.]

[Footnote 10:  Ib., p. 99.]