it clear
that Browning could sing as well as say: and from this time, 1846 (which
also was the year of his marriage with Miss Elizabeth Barrett), he could
claim rank as a great poet. He had been hitherto more or less a
wanderer, but with headquarters in England; he now went to Florence,
which in turn was his headquarters till his wife's death in 1861. His
publications during the time were only two--_Christmas Eve and Easter
Day_ in 1850, and _Men and Women_ in 1855. But these were both
masterpieces. He never did better work, and, with _Bells and
Pomegranates_ and _Dramatis Personae_, which appeared in 1864 (when,
after Mrs. Browning's death, he had returned to London), they perhaps
contain all his very best work.

Up to this time, the thirty-first year from the publication of
_Pauline_, Browning's work, though by no means scanty, could hardly be
called voluminous as the result of half a lifetime of absolute leisure.
A little before _Dramatis Personae_--itself not a long book, though of
hardly surpassed quality--the whole of the poems except _Pauline_ had
been gathered into three small but thick volumes, which undoubtedly did
very much to spread the poet's fame--a spread much helped by their
immediate successors. The enormous poem of _The Ring and the Book_,
originally issued in four volumes and containing more than twenty
thousand verses, was published in 1869, and, the public being by this
time well prepared for it, received a welcome not below its merits.
Having at last gained the public ear, Mr. Browning did not fail to
improve the occasion, and of the next fifteen years few passed without a
volume, while some saw two, from his pen. These, including translations
of the _Alcestis_ and the _Agamemnon_ (for the poet was at this time
seized with a great fancy for Greek, which he rendered with much fluency
and a very singular indulgence in a sort of hybrid and pedantic spelling
of proper names), were _Balaustion's Adventure_ and _Prince
Hohenstiel-Schwangau_ (1871), _Fifine at the Fair_ (1872), _Red Cotton
Night-Cap Country_ (1873), _Aristophanes' Apology_ and _The Inn Album_
(1875), _Pacchiarotto and how he Worked in Distemper_ (1876), _La
Saisiaz_ (1878), _Dramatic Idylls_, two volumes (1879-80), _Jocoseria_
(1883), and _Ferishtah's Fancies_ (1884). The five remaining years of
Browning's long life were somewhat less fruitful; but _Parleyings with
Certain People of Importance_ came in 1887, and at the end of 1889,
almos