to the work, as one who had indeed had everything, but who was as little inclined to abandon himself to the past as to forget it.  After visiting his father in Paris—­the “dear nonno” of his wife’s charming letters[39]—­he settled in London, at first in lodgings, then at the house in Warwick Crescent which was for a quarter of a century to be his home.  Something of that dreary first winter found its way, ten years later, through whatever dramatic disguise, into the poignant epilogue of Fifine.  Browning had been that “Householder,” had gone through the dragging days and nights,—­

     “All the fuss and trouble of street-sounds, window-sights,
      All the worry of flapping door and echoing roof; and then
      All the fancies,”—­

perhaps, among them, that of the “knock, call, cry,” and the pang and rapture of the visionary meeting.  Certainly one of the effects of his loss was to accentuate the mood of savage isolation which lurked beneath Browning’s genial sociality.  The world from which his saint had been snatched looked very common, sordid, and mean, and he resented its intrusiveness on occasion with startling violence.  When proposals were made in 1863 in various quarters to publish her life, he turned like a wild beast upon the “blackguards” who “thrust their paws into his bowels” by prying into his intimacies.  To the last he dismissed similar proposals by critics of the highest status with a cavalier bluntness highly surprising to persons who only knew him as the man of punctilious observance and fastidious good form.  For the rest, London contained much that was bound by degrees to temper the gloom and assuage the hostility.  Florence and Rome could furnish nothing like the circle of men of genius and varied accomplishment, using like himself the language of Shakespeare and Milton, in which he presently began to move as an intimate.  Thackeray, Ruskin, Tennyson, Carlyle, Rossetti, Leighton, Woolner, Prinsep, and many more, added a kind of richness to his life which during the last fifteen years he had only enjoyed at intervals.  And the flock of old friends who accepted Browning began to be reinforced by a crowd of unknown readers who proclaimed him.  Tennyson was his loyal comrade; but the prestige of Tennyson’s popularity had certainly blocked many of the avenues of Browning’s fame, appealing as the Laureate largely did to tastes in poetry which Browning rudely traversed or ignored.  On the Tennysonian reader pur sang Browning’s work was pretty sure to make the impression so frankly described by Frederick Tennyson to his brother, of “Chinese puzzles, trackless labyrinths, unapproachable nebulosities.”  Even among these intimates of his own generation were doubtless some who, with F. Tennyson again, believed him to be “a man of infinite learning, jest, and bonhomie, and a sterling heart that reverbs no hollowness,” but who yet held “his school of poetry” to be “the most grotesque conceivable.”  This was the