of Marion Erle in _Aurora Leigh_. But many complexities in the working
out mark Browning's design. The betrayed girl, scornfully refusing her
betrayer's tardy offer of marriage, has sought a refuge, as the wife of
a clergyman, in the drudgery of a benighted parish. The chance meeting
of the two, four years after, in the inn parlour, their bitter
confessions, through the veil of mutual hatred, that life has been
ruined for both,--he, with his scandalous successes growing at last
notorious, she, the soul which once "sprang at love," now sealed
deliberately against beauty, and spent in preaching monstrous doctrines
which neither they nor their savage parishioners believe nor
observe,--all this is imagined very powerfully and on lines which would
hardly have occurred to any one else.

The _Pacchiarotto_ volume forms a kind of epilogue to the work of the
previous half-dozen years. Since _The Ring and the Book_ he had become a
famous personage; his successive poems had been everywhere reviewed at
length; a large public was genuinely interested in him, while a yet
larger complained of his "obscurity," but did not venture to ignore him,
and gossiped eagerly about his private life. He himself, mingling
freely, an ever-welcome guest, in the choicest London society, had the
air of having accepted the world as cordially as it on the whole
accepted him. Yet barriers remained. Poems like the _Red-cotton
Night-cap Country_, the _Inn Album_, and _Fifine_ had alienated many
whom _The Ring and the Book_ had won captive, and embarrassed the
defence of some of Browning's staunchest devotees. Nobody knew better
than the popular diner-out, Robert Browning, how few of the men and
women who listened to his brilliant talk had any grip upon his inner
mind; and he did little to assist their insight. The most affable and
accessible of men up to a certain point, he still held himself, in the
deeper matters of his art, serenely and securely aloof. But it was a