tiel-Schwangau' was written in Scotland, where Mr.
Browning was the guest of Mr. Ernest Benzon: having left his sister to
the care of M. and Madame Milsand at St.-Aubin. The ailment he speaks
of consisted, I believe, of a severe cold. Another of the occurrences
of 1871 was Mr. Browning's election as Life Governor of the London
University.

A passage from a letter dated March 30, '72, bears striking testimony to
the constant warmth of his affections.

'. . . The misfortune, which I did not guess when I accepted the
invitation, is that I shall lose some of the last days of Milsand, who
has been here for the last month: no words can express the love I have
for him, you know. He is increasingly precious to me. . . . Waring
came back the other day, after thirty years' absence, the same as
ever,--nearly. He has been Prime Minister at New Zealand for a year and
a half, but gets tired, and returns home with a poem.'*

* 'Ranolf and Amohia'.

This is my last extract from the correspondence with Miss Blagden. Her
death closed it altogether within the year.

It is difficult to infer from letters, however intimate, the dominant
state of the writer's mind: most of all to do so in Mr. Browning's case,
from such passages of his correspondence as circumstances allow me
to quote. Letters written in intimacy, and to the same friend, often
express a recurrent mood, a revived set of associations, which for the
moment destroys the habitual balance of feeling. The same effect is
sometimes produced in personal intercourse; and the more varied the
life, the more versatile the nature, the more readily in either case
will a lately unused spring of emotion well up at the passing touch.
We may even fancy we read into the letters of 1870 that eerie, haunting
sadness of a cherished memory from which, in spite of ourselves, life
is bearing us away. We may also err in so doing. But literary creation,
patiently carried on through a given period, is usually a fair
reflection of the general moral and mental conditions under which it has
taken place; and it would be hard to imagine from Mr. Browning's work
during these last ten years that any but gracious influences had been
operating upon his genius, any more disturbing element than the sense of
privation and loss had entered into his inner life.

Some leaven of bitterness must, nevertheless, have been working within
him, or he could never have produced that piece of perplexing cynicism,