ng's mind.
A slight exception may be made for some passages in 'Red Cotton Nightcap
Country', and for one of the poems of the 'Pacchiarotto' volume; but
otherwise no sign of moral or mental disturbance betrays itself in his
subsequent work. The past and the present gradually assumed for him a
more just relation to each other. He learned to meet life as it offered
itself to him with a more frank recognition of its good gifts, a more
grateful response to them. He grew happier, hence more genial, as the
years advanced.

It was not without misgiving that Mr. Browning published 'Fifine at
the Fair'; but many years were to pass before he realized the kind of
criticism to which it had exposed him. The belief conveyed in the
letter to Miss Blagden that what proceeds from a genuine inspiration is
justified by it, combined with the indifference to public opinion
which had been engendered in him by its long neglect, made him slow to
anticipate the results of external judgment, even where he was in some
degree prepared to endorse them. For his value as a poet, it was best
so.

The August of 1872 and of 1873 again found him with his sister at
St.-Aubin, and the earlier visit was an important one: since it supplied
him with the materials of his next work, of which Miss Annie Thackeray,
there also for a few days, suggested the title. The tragic drama which
forms the subject of Mr. Browning's poem had been in great part enacted
in the vicinity of St.-Aubin; and the case of disputed inheritance to
which it had given rise was pending at that moment in the tribunals of
Caen. The prevailing impression left on Miss Thackeray's mind by this
primitive district was, she declared, that of white cotton nightcaps
(the habitual headgear of the Normandy peasants). She engaged to write
a story called 'White Cotton Nightcap Country'; and Mr. Browning's quick
sense of both contrast and analogy inspired the introduction of
this emblem of repose into his own picture of that peaceful, prosaic
existence, and of the ghastly spiritual conflict to which it had served
as background. He employed a good deal of perhaps strained ingenuity in
the opening pages of the work, in making the white cap foreshadow the
red, itself the symbol of liberty, and only indirectly connected with
tragic events; and he would, I think, have emphasized the irony of
circumstance in a manner more characteristic of himself, if he had laid
his stress on the remoteness from 'the maddin