one of the brilliant irresponsible Sophists of the next generation.

[Footnote 61: It is hard to explain how Browning came also to choose his
restless hendecasyllables as a medium for the stately iambic of
Æschylus. It is more like Fletcher outdoing himself in double endings.]

The spring and summer of 1877 were not productive. The summer holiday
was spent in a new haunt among the Savoy Alps, and Browning missed the
familiar stimulus of the sea-air. But the early autumn brought an event
which abruptly shattered his quiescence, and called forth, presently,
the most intimately personal poem of his later years. Miss Ann
Egerton-Smith, his gifted and congenial companion at London concerts,
and now, for the fourth year in succession, in the summer
_villeggiatura_, died suddenly of heart disease at dawn on Sept. 14, as
she was preparing for a mountain expedition with her friends. It was not
one of those losses which stifle thought or sweep it along on the
vehement tide of lyric utterance; it was rather of the kind which set it
free, creating an atmosphere of luminous serenity about it, and allaying
all meaner allurements and distractions. Elegy is often the outcome of
such moods; and the elegiac note is perceptible in the grave music of
_La Saisiaz_. Yet the poem as a whole does not even distantly recall,
save in the quiet intensity of its ground tone, the noble poems in which
Milton or Shelley, Arnold or Tennyson, commemorated their dead friends.
He himself commemorated no other dead friend in a way like this; to his
wife's memory he had given only the sacred silence, the impassioned
hymn, the wealth of poetry inspired by her spirit but not addressed to
her. This poem, also, was written "once, and only once, and for one
only." _La Saisiaz_ recalls to us, perversely perhaps, poems of his in
which no personal sorrow beats. The glory of the dawn and the
mountain-peak--Salève with its outlook over the snowy splendour of Mont