ned the greatness of Robert Browning as
swiftly as any transatlantic dwellers on the watch-tower.

Rossetti, who from the days that he copied "Pauline" in the British Museum
Library, not knowing the author, was an ardent admirer of Browning, found
himself in Paris, and he and Browning passed long mornings in the Louvre.
The painter declared that Browning's knowledge of early Italian art was
beyond that of any one whom he had met, Ruskin not excepted.

Ruskin was a standard of artistic measurement in those days to a degree
hardly conceivable now; not that much of his judgment does not stand the
test of time, but that authoritative criticism has so many embodiments.
Mrs. Browning, to whom Ruskin was one of the nearest of her circle,
considered him a critic who was half a poet as well, and her clear insight
discerned what is now universally recognized, that he was "encumbered by a
burning imagination." She told him that he was apt to light up any object
he looked upon, "just as we, when we carried torches into the Vatican,
were not clear as to how much we brought to that wonderful Demosthenes,
folding the marble round him in its thousand folds," and questioned as to
where was the dividing line between the sculptor and the torch-bearer.
This fairly clairvoyant insight of Mrs. Browning into character, the
ability to discern defects as well as virtues where she loved, and to
love where she discerned defects, is still further illustrated by a letter
of hers to Ruskin on the death of Miss Mitford. "But no, her 'judgment'
was not 'unerring,'" wrote Mrs. Browning. "She was too intensely
sympathetic not to err often ... if she loved a person it was enough....
And yet ... her judgment could be fine and discriminating, especially upon
subjects connected with life and society and manners."

Again, to a friend who had met a great bereavement she also wrote in these
Paris days:

"We get knowledge in losing what we hoped for, and liberty by losing
what we love. This world is a fragment, or, rather, a segment, and it
will be rounded presently. Not to doubt that is the greatest blessing
it gives now. The common impression of death is as false as it is
absurd. A mere change of circumstances,--what more? And how near these
spirits are, how conscious of us, how full of active energy, of tender
reminiscence and interest in us? Who shall dare to doubt? For myself,
I do not doubt at all."

In that latest co