for poor Cholmondeley and his friends, I should be glad
to apprehend no long journey -- besides the annoyance

of having to pass Florence and Rome unvisited, for S.'s sake, I mean:
even Naples would have been with its wonderful environs

a tantalizing impracticability.
`Your "Academy" came and was welcomed. The newspaper is like an electric eel,

as one touches it and expects a shock. I am very anxious about the Archbishop
who has always been strangely kind to me.'

==
He and his sister had accepted an invitation to spend the month of October

with Mr. Cholmondeley at his villa in Ischia; but the party assembled there
was broken up by the death of one of Mr. Cholmondeley's guests,

a young lady who had imprudently attempted the ascent of a dangerous mountain
without a guide, and who lost her life in the experiment.

A short extract from a letter to Mrs. Charles Skirrow will show
that even in this complete seclusion Mr. Browning's patriotism

did not go to sleep. There had been already sufficient evidence
that his friendship did not; but it was not in the nature

of his mental activities that they should be largely absorbed by politics,
though he followed the course of his country's history

as a necessary part of his own life. It needed a crisis
like that of our Egyptian campaign, or the subsequent Irish struggle,

to arouse him to a full emotionalparticipation in current events.
How deeply he could be thus aroused remained yet to be seen.

==
`If the George Smiths are still with you, give them my love,

and tell them we shall expect to see them at Venice, --
which was not so likely to be the case when we were bound for Ischia.

As for Lady Wolseley -- one dares not pretend to vie with her
in anxiety just now; but my own pulses beat pretty strongly

when I open the day's newspaper -- which, by some new arrangement, reaches us,
oftener than not, on the day after publication. Where is your Bertie?

I had an impassioned letter, a fortnight ago, from a nephew of mine,
who is in the second division [battalion?] of the Black Watch;

he was ordered to Edinburgh, and the regiment not dispatched, after all, --
it having just returned from India; the poor fellow wrote in his despair

"to know if I could do anything!" He may be wanted yet: though nothing
seems wanted in Egypt, so capital appears to be the management.'

==
In 1879 Mr. Browning published the first series of his `Dramatic Idyls';

and their appearance sent a thrill of surprised admiration
through the public mind. In `La Saisiaz' and the accompanying poems

he had accomplished what was virtually a life's work.
For he was approaching the appointed limit of man's existence;

and the poetic, which had been nourished in him by the natural life --
which had once outstripped its developments, but on the whole

remained subject to them -- had therefore, also, passed through
the successive phases of individual growth. He had been inspired

as dramatic poet by the one avowed conviction that little else is worth study
but the history of a soul; and outward act or circumstance

had only entered into his creations as condition or incident
of the given psychological state. His dramaticimagination had first,

however unconsciously, sought its materials in himself;
then gradually been projected into the world of men and women,

which his widening knowledge laid open to him; it is scarcely necessary
to say that its power was only fully revealed when it left

the remote regions of poetical and metaphysical self-consciousness,
to invoke the not less mysterious and far more searching utterance

of the general human heart. It was a matter of course
that in this expression of his dramaticgenius, the intellectual and emotional

should exhibit the varying relations which are developed by the natural life:
that feeling should begin by doing the work of thought, as in `Saul',

and thought end by doing the work of feeling, as in `Fifine at the Fair';
and that the two should alternate or combine in proportioned intensity

in such works of an intermediate period as `Cleon', `A Death in the Desert',
the `Epistle of Karshish', and `James Lee's Wife'; the sophistical ingenuities

of `Bishop Blougram', and `Sludge'; and the sad, appealing tenderness
of `Andrea del Sarto' and `The Worst of It'.

It was also almost inevitable that so vigorous a genius
should sometimes falsify calculations based on the normal life.

The long-continued force and freshness of Mr. Browning's general faculties
was in itself a protest against them. We saw without surprise

that during the decade which produced `Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau',
`Fifine at the Fair', and `Red Cotton Nightcap Country', he could give us

`The Inn Album', with its expression of the higher sexual love unsurpassed,
rarely equalled, in the whole range of his work: or those two

unique creations of airy fancy and passionate symbolic romance,
`Saint Martin's Summer', and `Numpholeptos'. It was no ground

for astonishment that the creative power in him should even ignore
the usual period of decline, and defy, so far as is humanly possible,

its natural laws of modification. But in the `Dramatic Idyls'
he did more than proceed with unflagging powers on a long-trodden,

distinctive course; he took a new departure.
Mr. Browning did not forsake the drama of motive when he imagined

and worked out his new group of poems; he presented it
in a no less subtle and complex form. But he gave it the added force

of picturesquerealization; and this by means of incidents
both powerful in themselves, and especially suited for its development.

It was only in proportion to this higher suggestiveness
that a startling situation ever seemed to him fit subject for poetry.

Where its interest and excitement exhausted themselves in the external facts,
it became, he thought, the property of the chronicler,

but supplied no material for the poet; and he often declined matter
which had been offered him for dramatictreatment because it belonged

to the more sensational category.
It is part of the vital quality of the `Dramatic Idyls' that, in them,

the act and the motive are not yet finally identified with each other.
We see the act still palpitating with the motive; the motive dimly striving

to recognize or disclaim itself in the act. It is in this
that the psychological poet stands more than ever strongly revealed.

Such at least is the case in `Martin Relph', and the idealized Russian legend,
`Ivan Ivanovitch'. The grotesquetragedy of `Ned Bratts' has also

its marked psychological aspects, but they are of a simpler and broader kind.
The new inspiration slowly subsided through the second series of `Idyls',

1880, and `Jocoseria', 1883. In `Ferishtah's Fancies', 1884,
Mr. Browning returned to his original manner, though carrying into it

something of the renewed vigour which had marked the intervening change.
The lyrics which alternate with its parables include some of the most tender,

most impassioned, and most musical of his love-poems.
The moral and religious opinions conveyed in this later volume may be accepted

without reserve as Mr. Browning's own, if we subtract from them
the exaggerations of the figurative and dramatic form.

It is indeed easy to recognize in them the under currents
of his whole real and imaginative life. They have also on one or two points

an intrinsic value which will justify a later allusion.
Chapter 19

1881-1887
The Browning Society; Mr. Furnivall; Miss E. H. Hickey --

His Attitude towards the Society; Letter to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald --
Mr. Thaxter, Mrs. Celia Thaxter -- Letter to Miss Hickey; `Strafford' --

Shakspere and Wordsworth Societies -- Letters to Professor Knight --
Appreciation in Italy; Professor Nencioni -- The Goldoni Sonnet --

Mr. Barrett Browning; Palazzo Manzoni -- Letters to Mrs. Charles Skirrow --
Mrs. Bloomfield Moore -- Llangollen; Sir Theodore and Lady Martin --

Loss of old Friends -- Foreign Correspondent of the Royal Academy --
`Parleyings with certain People of Importance in their Day'.

This Indian summer of Mr. Browning's genius coincided with
the highest manifestation of public interest, which he, or with one exception,

any living writer, had probably yet received: the establishment of a Society
bearing his name, and devoted to the study of his poetry.

The idea arose almost simultaneously in the mind of Dr., then Mr. Furnivall,
and of Miss E. H. Hickey. One day, in the July of 1881,

as they were on their way to Warwick Crescent to pay an appointed visit there,
Miss Hickey strongly expressed her opinion of the power and breadth

of Mr. Browning's work; and concluded by saying that
much as she loved Shakespeare, she found in certain aspects of Browning

what even Shakespeare could not give her. Mr. Furnivall replied to this
by asking what she would say to helping him to found a Browning Society;

and it then appeared that Miss Hickey had recently written to him a letter,
suggesting that he should found one; but that it had miscarried,

or, as she was disposed to think, not been posted. Being thus, at all events,
agreed as to the fitness of the undertaking, they immediately spoke of it

to Mr. Browning, who at first treated the project as a joke;