th the rarest exceptions, he replied to every
letter which came to him.

The late summer of the former year had been entirely unrefreshing, in
spite of his acknowledgment of the charms of St.-Enogat. There was more
distraction and more soothing in the stay at Cambo and Biarritz, which
was chosen for the holiday of 1862. Years afterwards, when the thought
of Italy carried with it less longing and even more pain, Mr. Browning
would speak of a visit to the Pyrenees, if not a residence among them,
as one of the restful possibilities of his later and freer life. He
wrote to Miss Blagden:

Biarritz, Maison Gastonbide: Sept. 19, '62.

'. . . I stayed a month at green pleasant little Cambo, and then came
here from pure inability to go elsewhere--St.-Jean de Luz, on which
I had reckoned, being still fuller of Spaniards who profit by the new
railway. This place is crammed with gay people of whom I see nothing
but their outsides. The sea, sands, and view of the Spanish coast and
mountains, are superb and this house is on the town's outskirts. I stay
till the end of the month, then go to Paris, and then get my neck back
into the old collar again. Pen has managed to get more enjoyment out of
his holiday than seemed at first likely--there was a nice French family
at Cambo with whom he fraternised, riding with the son and escorting
the daughter in her walks. His red cheeks look as they should. For me, I
have got on by having a great read at Euripides--the one book I brought
with me, besides attending to my own matters, my new poem that is about
to be; and of which the whole is pretty well in my head,--the Roman
murder story you know.

'. . . How I yearn, yearn for Italy at the close of my life! . . .'

The 'Roman murder story' was, I need hardly say, to become 'The Ring and
the Book'.

It has often been told, though with curious confusion as regards the
date, how Mr. Browning picked up the original parchment-bound record of
the Franceschini case, on a stall of the Piazza San Lorenzo. We read
in the first section of his own work that he plunged instantly into the
study of this record; that he had mastered it by the end of the day; and
that he then stepped out on to the terrace of his house amid the sultry
blackness and silent lightnings of the June night, as the adjacent
church of San Felice sent forth its chants, and voices buzzed in the
street below,--and saw the tragedy as a living picture unfold itself
before him. These