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 Personæ_ 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 _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 "without _Backbone_ or
basis of Common-sense," and "among the absurdest books ever written by a
gifted Man." Tennyson, however, admitted (to FitzGerald) that he "found
greatness" in it,[47] and Mr Swinburne was in the forefront of the