y had little or no part in his
attitude towards it. For him, a body from which the soul had passed,
held nothing of the person whose earthly vesture it had been. He had no
sympathy for the still human tenderness with which so many of us regard
the mortal remains of those they have loved, or with the solemn or
friendly interest in which that tenderness so often reflects itself in
more neutral minds. He would claim all respect for the corpse, but he
would turn away from it. Another aspect of this feeling shows itself in
a letter to one of his brothers-in-law, Mr. George Moulton-Barrett, in
reference to his wife's monument, with which Mr. Barrett had professed
himself pleased. His tone is characterized by an almost religious
reverence for the memory which that monument enshrines. He nevertheless
writes:

'I hope to see it one day--and, although I have no kind of concern as to
where the old clothes of myself shall be thrown, yet, if my fortune be
such, and my survivors be not unduly troubled, I should like them to lie
in the place I have retained there. It is no matter, however.'

The letter is dated October 19, 1866. He never saw Florence again.

Mr. Browning spent two months with his father and sister at St.-Enogat,
near Dinard, from which place the letter to Miss Blagden was written;
and then proceeded to London, where his wife's sister, Miss Arabel
Barrett, was living. He had declared in his first grief that he would
never keep house again, and he began his solitary life in lodgings
which at his request she had engaged for him; but the discomfort of this
arrangement soon wearied him of it; and before many months had passed,
he had sent to Florence for his furniture, and settled himself in the
house in Warwick Crescent, which possessed, besides other advantages,
that of being close to Delamere Terrace, where Miss Barrett had taken up
her abode.

This first period of Mr. Browning's widowed life was one of unutterable
dreariness, in which the smallest and yet most unconquerable element was
the prosaic ugliness of everything which surrounded him. It was fifteen
years since he had spent a winter in England; he had never spent one in
London. There had been nothing to break for him the transition from the
stately beauty of Florence to the impressions and associations of the
Harrow and Edgware Roads, and of Paddington Green. He might have
escaped this neighbourhood by way of Westbourne Terrace; but his
walks constantly