o was as little
inclined to abandon himself to the past as to forget it. After visiting
his father in Paris--the "dear _nonno_" of his wife's charming
letters[39]--he settled in London, at first in lodgings, then at the
house in Warwick Crescent which was for a quarter of a century to be his
home. Something of that dreary first winter found its way, ten years
later, through whatever dramatic disguise, into the poignant epilogue of
_Fifine_. Browning had been that "Householder," had gone through the
dragging days and nights,--

"All the fuss and trouble of street-sounds, window-sights,
All the worry of flapping door and echoing roof; and then
All the fancies,"--

perhaps, among them, that of the "knock, call, cry," and the pang and
rapture of the visionary meeting. Certainly one of the effects of his
loss was to accentuate the mood of savage isolation which lurked beneath
Browning's genial sociality. The world from which his saint had been
snatched looked very common, sordid, and mean, and he resented its
intrusiveness on occasion with startling violence. When proposals were
made in 1863 in various quarters to publish her life, he turned like a
wild beast upon the "blackguards" who "thrust their paws into his
bowels" by prying into his intimacies. To the last he dismissed similar
proposals by critics of the highest status with a cavalier bluntness
highly surprising to persons who only knew him as the man of punctilious
observance and fastidious good form. For the rest, London contained much
that was bound by degrees to temper the gloom and assuage the hostility.
Florence and Rome could furnish nothing like the circle of men of genius
and varied accomplishment, using like himself the language of
Shakespeare and Milton, in which he presently began to move as an
intimate. Thackeray, Ruskin, Tennyson, Carlyle, Rossetti, Leighton,
Woolner, Prinsep, and many more, added a kind of richness to his life
which during the last fifteen years he had only enjoyed at intervals.
And the flock of old friends who accepted Browning began to be
reinforced by a crowd of unknown readers who proclaimed him. Tennyson
was his loyal comrade; but the prestige of Tennyson's popularity had
certainly blocked many of the avenues of Browning's fame, appealing as
the Laureate largely did to tastes in poetry which Browning rudely
traversed or ignored. On the Tennysonian reader _pur sang_ Browning's
work was pretty sure to make the impr