upon a dead face.

We know little of Browning's inner or outer life in 1833 and 1834. It
was a secretive, not a productive period. One by one certain pinnacles
of his fair snow-mountain of Titanic aim melted away. He began to
realise the first disenchantment of the artist: the sense of dreams
never to be accomplished. That land of the great unwritten poems, the
great unpainted pictures: what a heritance there for the enfranchised
spirits of great dreamers!

In the autumn of 1833 he went forth to his University, that of the world
of men and women. It was ever a favourite answer of his, when asked if
he had been at either Oxford or Cambridge,--"Italy was my University."

But first he went to Russia, and spent some time in St. Petersburg,
attracted thither by the invitation of a friend. The country interested
him, but does not seem to have deeply or permanently engaged his
attention. That, however, his Russian experiences were not fruitless is
manifest from the remarkably picturesque and technically very
interesting poem, "Ivan Ivanovitch" (the fourth of the _Dramatic Idyls_,
1879). Of a truth, after his own race and country--readers will at once
think of "Home Thoughts from the Sea," or the thrilling lines in "Home
Thoughts from Abroad," beginning--

"Oh, to be in England,
Now that April's there!"--

or perhaps, those lines in his earliest work--

"I cherish most
My love of England--how, her name, a word
Of hers in a strange tongue makes my heart beat!"

--it was of the mystic Orient or of the glowing South that he oftenest
thought and dreamed. With Heine he might have cried: "O Firdusi! O
Ischami! O Saadi! How do I long after the roses of Schiraz!" As for
Italy, who of all our truest poets has not loved her: but who has
worshipped her with so manly a passion, so loyal a love, as Browning?
One alone indeed may be mated with him here, she who had his heart of
hearts, and who lies at rest in the old Florentine cemetery within sound
of the loved waters of Arno. Who can forget his lines in "De Gustibus,"
"Open my heart and you will see, graved inside of it, Italy."

It would be no difficult task to devote a volume larger than the present
one to the descriptive analysis of none but the poems inspired by Italy,
Italian personages and history, Italian Painting, Sculpture,
Architecture, and Music. From Porphyria and her lover to Pompilia and
all the direful Roman tragedy