the religious and the human sense, where ancient learning and piety
breathed through the consecrated edifice, or where only the figurative
'two or three' were 'gathered together' within it. A memorial tablet now
marks the spot at which on this occasion the sweet grave face and the
venerable head were so often seen. It has been placed by the direction
of Lady Martin on the adjoining wall.

It was in the September of this year that Mr. Browning heard of the
death of M. Joseph Milsand. This name represented for him one of the few
close friendships which were to remain until the end, unclouded in
fact and in remembrance; and although some weight may be given to those
circumstances of their lives which precluded all possibility of friction
and risk of disenchantment, I believe their rooted sympathy, and Mr.
Browning's unfailing powers of appreciation would, in all possible
cases, have maintained the bond intact. The event was at the last
sudden, but happily not quite unexpected.

Many other friends had passed by this time out of the poet's life--those
of a younger, as well as his own and an older generation. Miss Haworth
died in 1883. Charles Dickens, with whom he had remained on the most
cordial terms, had walked between him and his son at Thackeray's
funeral, to receive from him, only seven years later, the same pious
office. Lady Augusta Stanley, the daughter of his old friend, Lady
Elgin, was dead, and her husband, the Dean of Westminster. So also were
'Barry Cornwall' and John Forster, Alfred Domett, and Thomas Carlyle,
Mr. Cholmondeley and Lord Houghton; others still, both men and women,
whose love for him might entitle them to a place in his Biography, but
whom I could at most only mention by name.

For none of these can his feeling have been more constant or more
disinterested than that which bound him to Carlyle. He visited him
at Chelsea in the last weary days of his long life, as often as their
distance from each other and his own engagements allowed. Even the man's
posthumous self-disclosures scarcely availed to destroy the affectionate
reverence which he had always felt for him. He never ceased to defend
him against the charge of unkindness to his wife, or to believe that in
the matter of their domestic unhappiness she was the more responsible
of the two.* Yet Carlyle had never rendered him that service, easy as it
appears, which one man of letters most justly values from another:
that of proclaiming the admir