story of Pompilia. Some stout recalcitrants, it is true, like Edward
FitzGerald, held their ground. And while the tone of even hostile
criticism became respectful, enough of it remained to provide objects,
seven years later, for the uproarious chaff of _Pacchiarotto_.

From 1869 to 1871 Browning published nothing, and he appears also to
have written nothing beyond a sonnet commemorating Helen, the mother of
Lord Dufferin (dated April 26, 1870), almost the only set of fourteen
lines in his works of which not one proclaims his authorship. But the
decade which followed was more prolific than any other ten years of his
life. Between 1871 and 1878 nine volumes in swift succession allured,
provoked, or bewildered the reading world. Everything was now planned on
a larger scale; the vast compass and boundless volubility of _The Ring
and the Book_ became normal. He gave free rein to his delight in
intricate involutions of plot and of argument; the dramatic monologue
grew into novels in verse like _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_ and _The
Inn Album_; and the "special pleaders," Hohenstiel and Juan, expounded
their cases with a complexity of apparatus unapproached even by Sludge.
A certain relaxation of poetic nerve is on the whole everywhere
apparent, notwithstanding the prodigal display of crude intellectual
power. His poetic alchemy is less potent, the ore of sordid fact remains
sordid still. Not that his high spirituality is insecure, his heroic
idealism dimmed; but they coalesce less intimately with the alert wit
and busy intelligence of the mere "clever man," and seek their nutriment
and material more readily in regions of legend and romance, where the
transmuting work of imagination has been already done. It is no accident
that his lifelong delight in the ideal figures of Greek tragedy, so
unlike his own creations, became in these years for the first time an
effective source of poetry. The poems of this decade form thus an odd
motley series--realism and romance interlaced but hardly blent,