period of eight or nine years (1855-1864), between the
publication of "Men and Women" and "Dramatis Personae," was due in some
measure to the poet's incessant and anxious care for his wife, to the
deep sorrow of witnessing her slow but visible passing away, and to the
profound grief occasioned by her death. However, barrenness of
imaginative creative activity can be only very relatively affirmed, even
of so long a period, of years wherein were written such memorable and
treasurable poems as 'James Lee's Wife,' among Browning's writings what
'Maud' is among Lord Tennyson's; 'Gold Hair: a Legend of Pornic;' 'Dis
Aliter Visum;' 'Abt Vogler,' the most notable production of its kind in
the language; 'A Death in the Desert,' that singular and impressive
study; 'Caliban upon Setebos,' in its strange potency of interest and
stranger poetic note, absolutely unique; 'Youth and Art;' 'Apparent
Failure;' 'Prospice,' that noble lyrical defiance of death; and the
supremely lofty and significant series of weighty stanzas, 'Rabbi Ben
Ezra,' the most quintessential of all the distinctively psychical
monologues which Browning has written. It seems to me that if these two
poems only, "Prospice" and "Rabbi Ben Ezra," were to survive to the day
of Macaulay's New Zealander, the contemporaries of that meditative
traveller would have sufficient to enable them to understand the great
fame of the poet of "dim ancestral days," as the more acute among them
could discern something of the real Shelley, though time had preserved
but the three lines--

"Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child" ...

something of the real Catullus, through the mists of remote antiquity,
if there had not perished the single passionate cry--

"Lesbia illa,
Illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam
Plus quam se, atque suos amavit omnes!"

At the beginning of July (1858), the Brownings left Florence for the
summer and autumn, and by easy stages travelled to Normandy. Here the
invalid benefited considerably at first: and here, I may add, Browning
wrote his 'Legend of Pornic,' 'Gold-Hair.' This poem of twenty-seven
five-line stanzas (which differs only from that in more recent
"Collected Works," and "Selections," in its lack of the three stanzas
now numbered xxi., xxii., and xxiii.) was printed for limited private
circulation, though primarily for the purpose o