they must have held many reminiscences of galleries and studios,
and of the places in which pictures are bought and sold.

But his love for music was as certainly starved as the delight
in painting and sculpture was nourished; and it had now grown into a passion,

from the indulgence of which he derived, as he always declared,
some of the most beneficent influences of his life. It would be scarcely

an exaggeration to say that he attended every important concert of the season,
whether isolated or given in a course. There was no engagement

possible or actual, which did not yield to the discovery of its clashing
with the day and hour fixed for one of these. His frequent companion

on such occasions was Miss Egerton-Smith.
Miss Smith became only known to Mr. Browning's general acquaintance

through the dedicatory `A. E. S.' of `La Saisiaz'; but she was,
at the time of her death, one of his oldest women friends.

He first met her as a young woman in Florence when she was visiting there;
and the love for and proficiency in music soon asserted itself

as a bond of sympathy between them. They did not, however,
see much of each other till he had finally left Italy,

and she also had made her home in London. She there led a secluded life,
although free from family ties, and enjoying a large income

derived from the ownership of an important provincial paper.
Mr. Browning was one of the very few persons whose society

she cared to cultivate; and for many years the common musical interest
took the practical, and for both of them convenient form,

of their going to concerts together. After her death, in the autumn of 1877,
he almost mechanically renounced all the musical entertainments

to which she had so regularly accompanied him. The special motive
and special facility were gone -- she had been wont to call for him

in her carriage; the habit was broken; there would have been first pain,
and afterwards an unwelcomeexertion in renewing it. Time was also

beginning to sap his strength, while society, and perhaps friendship,
were making increasing claims upon it. It may have been for this same reason

that music after a time seemed to pass out of his life altogether.
Yet its almost sudden eclipse was striking in the case of one

who not only had been so deeply susceptible to its emotional" target="_blank" title="a.易动感情的；情感的">emotional influences,
so conversant with its scientificconstruction and its multitudinous forms,

but who was acknowledged as `musical' by those who best knew
the subtle and complex meaning of that often misused term.

Mr. Browning could do all that I have said during the period through which
we are now following him; but he could not quite do it with impunity.

Each winter brought its searching attack of cold and cough;
each summer reduced him to the state of nervous prostration or physical apathy

of which I have already spoken, and which at once rendered
change imperative, and the exertion of seeking it almost intolerable.

His health and spirits rebounded at the first draught of foreign air;
the first breath from an English cliff or moor might have had the same result.

But the remembrance of this fact never nerved him to the preliminary effort.
The conviction renewed itself with the close of every season,

that the best thing which could happen to him would be to be
left quiet at home; and his disinclination to face even the idea of moving

equally hampered his sister in her endeavour to make timely arrangements
for their change of abode.

This special craving for rest helped to limit the area from which
their summer resort could be chosen. It precluded all idea of `pension'-life,

hence of any much-frequented spot in Switzerland or Germany.
It was tacitly understood that the shortening days were not to be passed

in England. Italy did not yet associate itself with the possibilities
of a moderately short absence; the resources of the northern French coast

were becoming exhausted; and as the August of 1874 approached,
the question of how and where this and the following months

were to be spent was, perhaps, more than ever a perplexing one.
It was now Miss Smith who became the means of its solution.

She had more than once joined Mr. and Miss Browning at the seaside.
She was anxious this year to do so again, and she suggested for their meeting

a quiet spot called Mers, almost adjoining the fashionable Treport,
but distinct from it. It was agreed that they should try it;

and the experiment, which they had no reason to regret,
opened also in some degree a way out of future difficulties.

Mers was young, and had the defect of its quality. Only one desirable house
was to be found there; and the plan of joint residence became converted

into one of joint housekeeping, in which Mr. and Miss Browning
at first refused to concur, but which worked so well that it was renewed

in the three ensuing summers: Miss Smith retaining the initiative
in the choice of place, her friends the right of veto upon it.

They stayed again together in 1875 at Villers, on the coast of Normandy;
in 1876 at the Isle of Arran; in 1877 at a house called La Saisiaz --

Savoyard for the sun -- in the Saleve district near Geneva.
The autumn months of 1874 were marked for Mr. Browning

by an important piece of work: the production of `Aristophanes' Apology'.
It was far advanced when he returned to London in November,

after a visit to Antwerp, where his son was studying art under M. Heyermans;
and its much later appearance must have been intended

to give breathing time to the readers of `Red Cotton Nightcap Country'.
Mr. Browning subsequently admitted that he sometimes, during these years,

allowed active literaryoccupation to interfere too much
with the good which his holiday might have done him; but the temptations

to literary activity were this time too great to be withstood.
The house occupied by him at Mers (Maison Robert) was the last

of the straggling village, and stood on a rising cliff.
In front was the open sea; beyond it a long stretch of down;

everywhere comparativesolitude. Here, in uninterrupted quiet,
and in a room devoted to his use, Mr. Browning would work till

the afternoon was advanced, and then set forth on a long walk over the cliffs,
often in the face of a wind which, as he wrote of it at the time,

he could lean against as if it were a wall. And during this time
he was living, not only in his work, but with the man who had inspired it.

The image of Aristophanes, in the half-shamed insolence,
the disordered majesty, in which he is placed before the reader's mind,

was present to him from the first moment in which the Defence was conceived.
What was still more interesting, he could see him, hear him,

think with him, speak for him, and still inevitablycondemn him.
No such instance of always ingenious, and sometimes earnest pleading

foredoomed to complete discomfiture, occurs in Mr. Browning's works.
To Aristophanes he gave the dramaticsympathy which one lover of life

can extend to another, though that other unduly extol its lower forms.
To Euripides he brought the palm of the higher truth,

to his work the tribute of the more pathetic human emotion.
Even these for a moment ministered to the greatness of Aristophanes,

in the tear shed by him to the memory of his rival,
in the hour of his own triumph; and we may be quite sure

that when Mr. Browning depicted that scene, and again when he translated
the great tragedian's words, his own eyes were dimmed.

Large tears fell from them, and emotion choked his voice,
when he first read aloud the transcript of the `Herakles' to a friend,

who was often privileged to hear him.
Mr. Browning's deep feeling for the humanities of Greek literature,

and his almost passionate love for the language, contrasted strongly
with his refusal to regard even the first of Greek writers

as models of literary style. The pretensions raised for them on this ground
were inconceivable to him; and his translation of the `Agamemnon',

published 1877, was partly made, I am convinced, for the pleasure of exposing
these claims, and of rebuking them. His preface to the transcript gives

evidence of this. The glee with which he pointed to it when it first appeared
was no less significant.

At Villers, in 1875, he only corrected the proofs of `The Inn Album'
for publication in November. When the party started for the Isle of Arran,

in the autumn of 1876, the `Pacchiarotto' volume had already appeared.
When Mr. Browning discontinued his short-lived habit of visiting

away from home, he made an exception in favour of the Universities.
His occasional visits to Oxford and Cambridge were maintained

till the very end of his life, with increasing frequency in the former case;
and the days spent at Balliol and Trinity afforded him as unmixed a pleasure

as was compatible with the interruption of his daily habits,
and with a system of hospitality which would detain him

for many hours at table. A vivid picture of them is given
in two letters, dated January 20 and March 10, 1877,

and addressed to one of his constant correspondents,
Mrs. Fitz-Gerald, of Shalstone Manor, Buckingham.

==
Dear Friend, I have your letter of yesterday, and thank you all I can

for its goodness and graciousness to me unworthy . . . I returned on Thursday
-- the hospitality of our Master being not easy to set aside.

But to begin with the beginning: the passage from London to Oxford
was exceptionally prosperous -- the train was full of men my friends.