human
which aroused his curiosity among the frippery of a Florentine stall, was as grotesquely casual an inception as poem ever had. But it was one of those accidents which, suddenly befalling a creative mind, organise its loose and scattered material with a magical potency unattainable by prolonged cogitation. The story of Pompilia took shape in the gloom and glare of a stormy Italian night of June 1860, as he watched from the balcony of Casa Guidi. The patient elaboration of after-years wrought into consummate expressiveness the _donnée_ 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
gpt
Lyric Love,
human
[48] After the completion of the _Dramatis Personæ_ in 1863-64, the
gpt
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
human
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 _Athenæum_ 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 FitzGerald's friends shared, according to him, the opinion of Carlyle, who roundly pronounced it
gpt
and
human
Tennyson, however, admitted (to FitzGerald) that he