r, telling of how
the stricken man paced the echoing hallways at night crying, "I want her!
I want her!" touches us like a great, strange sorrow that once pierced our
hearts.

But Robert Browning's nature was too strong to be subdued by grief. He
remembered that others, too, had buried their dead, and that sorrow had
been man's portion since the world began. He would live for his boy--for
Her child.

But Florence was no longer his Florence, and he made haste to settle up
his affairs and go back to England. He never returned to Florence, and
never saw the beautiful monument, designed by his lifelong friend,
Frederick Leighton.

When you visit the little English Cemetery at Florence, the slim little
girl that comes down the path, swinging the big bunch of keys, opens the
high iron gate and leads you, without word or question, straight to the
grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Browning was forty-nine when Mrs. Browning died.

And by the time he had reached his fiftieth meridian, England, harkening
to America's suggestion, was awakening to the fact that he was one of the
world's great poets.

Honors came slowly, but surely: Oxford with a degree; Saint Andrew's with
a Lord-Rectorship; publishers with advance payments. And when Smith and
Elder paid one hundred pounds for the poem of "Herve Riel," it seemed that
at last Browning's worth was being recognized. Not, of course, that money
is the infallible test, but even poetry has its Rialto, where the extent
of appreciation is shown by prices current.

Browning's best work was done after his wife's death; and in that love he
ever lived and breathed. In his seventy-fifth year, it filled his days and
dreams as though it were a thing of yesterday, singing in his heart a
perpetual eucharist.

"The Ring and the Book" must be regarded as Browning's crowning work.
Offhand critics have disposed of it, but the great minds go back to it
again and again. In the character of Pompilia the author sought to pay
tribute to the woman whose memory was ever in his mind; yet he was too
sensitive and shrinking to fully picture her. He sought to mask his
inspiration; but tender, loving recollections of "Ba" are interlaced and
interwoven through it all.

When Robert Browning died, in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-nine, the world of
literature and art uncovered in token of honor to one who had lived long
and well and had done a deathless work. And the doors of storied
Westminster opened wide t