on of after-years wrought
into consummate expressiveness the _donnee_ of that hour. But the
conditions under which the elaboration was carried out were pathetically
unlike those of the primal vision. Before the end of June in the
following year Mrs Browning died, and Browning presently left Florence
for ever. For the moment all the springs of poetry were dried up, and it
is credible enough that, as Mrs Orr says, Browning abandoned all thought
of a poem, and even handed over his material to another. But within a
few months, it is clear, the story of Pompilia not merely recovered its
hold upon his imagination, but gathered a subtle hallowing association
with what was most spiritual in that vanished past of which it was the
last and most brilliant gift. The poem which enshrined Pompilia was thus
instinct with reminiscence; it was, with all its abounding vitality, yet
commemorative and memorial; and we understand how Browning, no friend of
the conventions of poetic art, entered on and closed his giant task with
an invocation to the "Lyric Love," as it were the Urania, or heavenly
Muse, of a modern epic.

The definite planning of the poem in its present shape belongs to the
autumn of 1862. In September 1862 he wrote to Miss Blagden from Biarritz
of "my new poem which is about to be, and of which the whole is pretty
well in my head--the Roman murder-story, you know."[48] After the
completion of the _Dramatis Personae_ in 1863-64, the "Roman
murder-story" became his central occupation. To it three quiet early
morning hours were daily given, and it grew steadily under his hand. For
the rest he began to withdraw from his seclusion, to mix freely in
society, to "live and like earth's way." He talked openly among his
literary friends of the poem and its progress, rumour and speculation
busied themselves with it as never before with work of his, and the
literary world at large looked for its publication with eager and
curious interest. At length, in November 1868, the first instalment was
published. It was received by the most authoritative part of the press
with outspoken, even dithyrambic eulogies, in which the severely
judicial _Athenaeum_ took the lead. Confirmed sceptics or deriders, like
Edward FitzGerald, rubbed their eyes and tried once again, in vain, to
make the old barbarian's verses construe and scan. To critics trained in
classical traditions the original structure of the poem was extremely
disturbing; and most of Fitz