tone of the ’Fifties, when Tennyson’s vogue was at its height.  But with the ’Sixties there began to emerge a critical disposition to look beyond the trim pleasances of the Early Victorians to more daring romantic adventure in search of the truth that lies in beauty, and more fearless grip of the beauty that lies in truth.  The genius of the pre-Raphaelites began to find response.  And so did the yet richer and more composite genius of Browning.  Moreover, the immense vogue won by the poetry of his wife undoubtedly prepared the way for his more difficult but kindred work.  If Pippa Passes counts for something in Aurora Leigh, Aurora Leigh in its turn trained the future readers of The Ring and the Book.

[Footnote 39:  His father beautifully said of Mrs Browning’s portrait that it was a face which made the worship of saints seem possible.]

The altered situation became apparent on the publication, in rapid succession, in 1864, of Browning’s Dramatis Personae and Mr Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon.  Both volumes found their most enthusiastic readers at the universities.  “All my new cultivators are young men,” Browning wrote to Miss Blagden; adding, with a touch of malicious humour, “more than that, I observe that some of my old friends don’t like at all the irruption of outsiders who rescue me from their sober and private approval, and take those words out of their mouths which they ‘always meant to say,’ and never did.”  The volume included practically all that Browning had actually written since 1855,—­less than a score of pieces,—­the somewhat slender harves of nine years.  But during these later years in Italy, as we have seen, he had done little at his art; and after his return much time had been occupied in projecting the great scheme of that which figures in his familiar letters as his “murder-poem,” and was ultimately known as The Ring and the Book.  As a whole, the Dramatis Personae stands yet more clearly apart from Men and Women than that does from all that had gone before.  Both books contain some of his most magnificent work; but the earlier is full of summer light and glow, the later breathes the hectic and poignant splendour of autumn.  The sense of tragic loss broods over all its music.  In lyric strength and beauty there is no decay; but the dramatic imagination has certainly lost somewhat of its flexible strength and easy poise of wing:  falling back now upon the personal convictions of the poet, now upon the bald prose of daily life. Rabbi ben Ezra and Abt Vogler, A Death in the Desert, are as noble poetry as Andrea del Sarto or The Grammarian’s Funeral; but it is a poetry less charged with the “incidents” of any other soul than his own; and, on the other hand, Dis Aliter Visum and Youth and Art, and others, effective as they are, yet move in an atmosphere less remote from prose than any of the songs and lays of love which form one of the chief