Robert Browning
Browning, Robert (1812–1889), poet, was born on 7 May 1812 in Camberwell, London, the first of the two children of Robert Browning (1782–1866) and his wife, Sarah Anna, née Wiedemann (1772–1849).
Ancestry, childhood, and adolescence
Robert Browning's grandfather, also called Robert Browning (1749–1833), was of Dorset yeoman stock, and moved to London at the age of twenty. He eventually rose to a prominent position in the Bank of England, and married Margaret Tittle (1754–1789) who came from a family of some wealth emanating from the West Indies. The couple had a son, Robert, the father of the poet. After the death of his first wife, Browning's grandfather married a younger woman, with whom he had nine children. There was soon conflict between his first son and his new wife, and Browning's father was sent to the West Indies to work on a sugar plantation. Revolted by the slavery there, he soon returned to England and found employment as a clerk in the Bank of England, where he remained until 1852.
In 1811 Browning's father married Sarah Anna Wiedemann. She was ten years his senior, and came from a middle-class family originally from Dundee, which had settled in Camberwell, where the pair took a cottage. It was there that Robert Browning was born, and his birth was followed by that of his sister, Sarianna Browning (1814–1903).
By all testimony Robert Browning was a precocious child who insisted on showing off. He learned to read at an early age and from his largely self-taught cultivated parents he gained a love of music and classical literature. He seems to have attended a local dame school at the age of five but, owing to his superior knowledge, was sent home to avoid embarrassing the older boys. At seven he began at the Misses Readys' weekly boarding-school in nearby Peckham, where he was both lonely and bored; and then at about ten he moved to the tutelage of the Misses Readys' brother, the Revd Thomas Martin Ready, master of Peckham School, where again he believed that he was taught nothing. It was at home during weekends that his real education took place. His father helped him with Latin declensions by turning them into rhymes, encouraging him in Greek literature, and teaching him to draw and appreciate pictures at the nearby Dulwich Picture Gallery. His mother instructed him in the names of flowers, taught him to play the piano (at which she was quite talented), and encouraged him in the love of music. At home the four Brownings proved an extraordinarily close-knit family. Robert Browning left Peckham School at fourteen, and for the next two years, from 1826 to 1828, was tutored at home, primarily with the aim of making him a gentleman. It was, however, mostly from his eclectic reading in his father's library that Browning gained the wide-ranging erudition later manifested in his poetry.
As for verse, Browning had begun making rhymes as soon as he could talk. Although he was familiar with Shakespeare from earliest childhood, some of his earliest lines were in imitation of Macpherson's Ossian, whence he moved on to the English Romantics. His earliest poems, however, he destroyed. His parents were impressed by a collection of verse of somewhat later date and modestly entitled ‘Incondita’, and they unsuccessfully looked for a publisher. Only two poems, dating from his fourteenth year, survive: ‘The Dance of Death’, modelled on a poem of republican sympathies by Coleridge, and ‘The First-Born of Egypt’, demonstrating the influence of Byron, whose rebellious attitudes and dandiacal attitudes the young Browning found worthy of imitation in life as well as in verse.
After the imitative pieces of ‘Incondita’ Browning seems to have ceased writing poetry for five or six years, music becoming his chief means for finding expression, although he continued to regard the poet's calling as pre-eminent. Byron's influence on him began to wane at this time, and was replaced by that of Shelley, whom Browning found far less egotistic and cynical. Late in 1826 or in 1827 Browning's maternal cousin James Silverthorne gave him a copy of Shelley's Miscellaneous Poems (1826), in which he found set forth his own dreams and aspirations with a startlingly fresh beauty. Wanting to have more of the poet's work, he persuaded his pious mother to purchase for him the works of an evangelizing atheist. Reading them voraciously, Browning soon became an atheist and a vegetarian, and for the next few years ‘Shelley was his God’ (Domett, 141).
Fired with Shelley's beliefs and Byron's dandyism, the young Browning acted in such ways as to distress his parents, whom he felt did not appreciate him. Seeking to widen his acquaintance, he began calling regularly on the artistic, older Flower sisters. Eliza, a talented musician, may have given Robert music lessons, and, idolizing her, he composed a stream of verses and letters to her. Sarah was a poet also interested in the theatre. Together they probably exerted the greatest influence on Browning's adolescence, serving as models of artistic activity and providing him with a sentimental education. The young man, however, also had an influence on them, especially on Sarah, who wrote in November 1827 to her spiritual confessor that Robert had unsettled her religious beliefs.
To help in finding a publisher for Browning's ‘Incondita’, Eliza showed the poems to William Johnson Fox, a famed Unitarian minister and journalist of compelling personality. Liking them, but recognizing their derivative nature, Fox praised them in person to the young poet but advised against their publication, probably because of their extensive debt to Byron, and it may have been through Fox that the young poet disavowed Byron's great influence over himself and destroyed all copies of ‘Incondita’. In any case, Browning acknowledged Fox as his ‘literary father’ (Orr, Life, 43).
Following his two years of tutoring at home, Browning entered the newly founded University of London. His father had earlier subscribed £100 towards its foundation and this allowed him, as one of the ‘proprietors’, the right to free tuition for his nominee. In April 1828 the elder Browning applied for admission for his son, who was accepted. Robert, settled into a rooming-house in or near Bedford Square, began his classes in German, Greek, and Latin in late October. He was disappointed from the beginning, finding student life drab and the lectures for the most part perfunctory. He soon withdrew from his student lodging and went home to live while continuing his classes. At the end of the academic year he withdrew from the university.
The question then arose as to how the boy of seventeen was to make a living. His father had hoped that by attending the university he might qualify for the bar, but Browning expressed contempt for the legal profession. His father then suggested the medical profession, but although he visited Guy's Hospital, Browning's interest in medicine was merely that of the detached observer. What he undertook then was study with no goal in view, following an unsystematic course of reading in his father's library. As he was later to say, ‘[B]y the indulgence of my father and mother, I was allowed to live my own life and choose my own course in it’ (Orr, Life, 378).
The years from 1829 to 1833 are the least-known period in Browning's life. What is known is that he continued his self-education. He read widely in European culture in his father's library, the diverse subject matter that he hoped to master proving unending. The result was that Browning became, with the possible exception of Milton, the most learned of the great English poets. But more important than his gain of general knowledge during this period was his discovery of a philosophy far different from that of Shelley, which he had hitherto followed so devotedly.
What Browning perceived was that there is no stable centre of selfhood accessible to the thinking subject. The subject, he learned, is accessible only obliquely, not in the continuity of its self-consciousness but in the discontinuity of its shifting forms. And following this perception, he saw that truth and meaning are not fixed but, instead, are always becoming. Further, he saw that the questions posed determine to no small degree the answers reached, and that the angle of view limits visions of the whole. This apprehension caused Browning to conclude that not enough questions or enough points of view can ever be asked to gain a complete, encompassing overview of any matter. At best, one gains approximations of the truth which are always subject to better formulations. Absolute truth, then, is never present in the phenomenal world, although informing it. It was with such newly gained belief that he recoiled from Shelley's mythopoeic, visionary expressions about a world that can be redeemed by poets who are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.
Early published poetry
Yet it was not easy to break with Shelley. Browning's first act of exorcism occurred in Pauline; a Fragment of a Confession, composed late in 1832 and published anonymously by the firm of Saunders and Otley in March 1833, with the subsidy of £30 offered by a maternal aunt. In a kind of poetic autobiography, the speaker looks back over his past life in which he had deserted Pauline (who may have been inspired by Eliza Flower) and had foregone his inherited religious faith under the influence of the Sun-treader (Shelley). At the end, expressing a willingness to submit to the world of limitations and not seek hereafter for a world in which he will know all, he embraces God, Pauline, and the Sun-treader. Yet in the final verse paragraph it becomes clear that the poet's betrayal of Shelley the Sun-treader is a greater source of remorse than his forswearing of his traditional religious faith. Reviews of Pauline were mixed, W. J. Fox praising it and others despising it as unintelligible.
In February 1834 Browning took his first trip abroad: to St Petersburg at the invitation of the Russian consul-general to accompany him there. Browning was so fascinated by court life on this occasion that for a brief period he considered a diplomatic career. On his return to London he met in summer 1834 a young Frenchman, Count Amédée de Ripert-Monclar (1807–1871), an aristocrat who loved art and literature and was in close touch with the cultural life of France. They became close friends, and their friendship lasted until the 1840s, when they seem to have drifted apart. Monclar was an important influence on Browning in many ways, and he even seems to have influenced Browning's poetic development, in that he was to suggest Paracelsus as the subject for an extended piece of verse (Orr, Life, 72).
Browning began this poem early in October 1834, and completed it in mid-March 1835. His father bore the expense of publication, and Paracelsus was published anonymously on 15 August 1835. Although its format is that of a play—it was divided into five scenes and contained four characters—the author claims in the preface that it is not a drama nor a dramatic poem, but that each scene presents Paracelsus at a critical moment of his inner life in which he is brought by an articulation of his ‘mood’ to new insights. In effect, the five scenes are five monologues, in the first of which Paracelsus begins as a Shelleyan visionary whose role is to encounter the divine and reveal the results to mankind. At the close he comprehends how his pursuit was misconceived, for he learns that the noumenal, even if partially touched by means of language, cannot be communicated to others through the phenomenal, which is language. The reviews of the poem were largely favourable, although the work did not gain the author a great deal of money. For a number of years thereafter the title-pages of Browning's new works bore the legend ‘By the Author of Paracelsus’.
In the mid-1830s Browning was introduced to a number of literary figures through the agency of W. J. Fox. Although some of them (like Thomas Carlyle) found his dandyism in dress and manner off-putting, they soon discerned beneath the foppish surface a serious though ironic personality. In May 1836 Browning attended a supper at which he was toasted by Francis Talfourd, the host, Walter Savage Landor, and Wordsworth. Of most immediate importance, however, was the fact that William Charles Macready, the actor and producer of plays, asked the young poet to write a play for him.
Browning's Strafford was produced at Covent Garden on 1 May 1837, after some conflict with Macready and John Forster over its nature as a play. In the end, it ran for only five performances. It was not well received—apparently because, as the author said in the preface to the published play, his aim was ‘Action in Character rather than Character in Action’. Following his disappointment with the reception of Strafford, Browning visited Paris and in spring 1838 made a three-month tour of Europe. For the previous four or five years he had been working on a long poem devoted to the Italian troubadour Sordello, but he was so taken with Italy that he was unable to finish the poem among the scenes described in it. Sordello was not published until March 1840, again at the expense of his father.
Browning's conception of the poem had changed several times and his intractable materials could not be fused into a harmonious union. But to the poet this was no drawback, for, in his opinion, conventional formal unity and logical coherence were attributes merely of poetry of the past. His aim was to be one of the
setters-forth of unexampled themes,
Makers of quite new men.
(Sordello, 1.26–7)
This is why his speaker bids Shelley depart early on so that his poem, finally of approximately 5800 lines of rhymed couplets, can get down to business. Speaking in his own voice, the poet admits to a new kind of narrative presentation and to a new kind of genre (which mixed many genres). One of the chief characteristics of the poem that gives it its distinctive voice is parabasis: that is, the presence of digressions in which the author addresses the audience on personal or topical matters. After devoting six books often relating in a roundabout way to Sordello, in the end the narrator suggests that the real subject was not Sordello but rather the poet himself and his efforts to write the poem. Carefully ordered but appearing unstructured, purportedly historical but in fact deeply personal, generically indeterminate and stylistically complex, Sordello is unique in literary history.
Bells and Pomegranates
Browning believed that Sordello would make his reputation, but for the next two decades it had the opposite effect, as its critical reception was almost universally condemnatory. The poem ‘became notorious for its obscurity’, partly because Browning unreasonably assumed that his readers would be familiar with the thirteenth-century Italian history that was key to its narrative structure. Even Elizabeth Barrett, who was soon publicly to praise the young poet's work, had difficulty with Sordello, and the confusion prevailed well into the modern era, with only Ezra Pound finding the poem ‘a model of lucidity’, and consequently being ‘probably the only person who has ever seriously claimed to have understood Sordello’ (Poems, 1.1040). Certainly in his own time, the work damaged the young poet's standing, and his publisher, Edward Moxon, attempted to redeem Browning's reputation (as well as his own), with the suggestion that his next poetry be printed in a series of inexpensive paper-bound pamphlets, the cost to be borne by Browning's ever supportive father. Browning agreed and chose the general title Bells and Pomegranates hoping by this title to ‘indicate an endeavour towards something like an alternation, or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought; which looks too ambitious, thus expressed, so the symbol was preferred’ (ibid., 1.1069). The eight pamphlets were to contain seven plays and two collections of poems and were published between April 1841 and April 1846.
Pippa Passes (April 1841), the first number, contests Romantic notions of poetry as lyric effusion, a view summed up and advocated by J. S. Mill in two essays in 1833 in which he maintained that the greatest poetry is by nature soliloquy, not heard but overheard. In Pippa Passes, Browning presents a heroine whose key mode of utterance is lyric poetry overheard by others. The innocence and religiosity of Pippa's song which is inadvertently overheard by the various characters is crucial. As she sings famously at the beginning of the poem:
God's in his heaven—
All's right with the world!
But all is emphatically not right in the world of Pippa Passes, and the overheard lyric acts as a commentary on the auditors' situations, and acts on the characters to great effect, causing significant changes in their viewpoints and actions. In working out the implications of this mode of poetic utterance Browning showed that the poet has a dialogic relationship with the audience and a responsibility from which he or she cannot escape. In effect, in the four scenes Browning shows how poetry is theatre, or performance, before an interactive audience.
The next pamphlet and four more of them were plays, which Browning designed for stage production. The only one produced, by Macready against his better judgement, was A Blot in the 'Scutcheon. Presented in February 1843, it was withdrawn after three performances, at which point Browning's break with Macready was complete and so, effectively, were his hopes for the stage. The plays offer little plot and almost no action, their interest (as in Strafford) centring on action in character rather than character in action. The root conception of Browning's plays lies in the conflict between love and duty, or love and power, which is for the most part worked out within a political situation. However interesting to Browning, this was far from being the primary focus that theatregoers expected.
Pamphlets three and seven—Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845)—contain some of Browning's best-known poems, such as ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Porphyria's Lover’, and ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St Praxed's Church’. These are dramatic monologues (called by the poet dramatic lyrics or dramatic romances), which take the form of narratives told in the first person by a carefully characterized narrator who, so distanced, is understood to be distinct from the poet. Browning's achievement in grounding these narrators in their historical milieu was memorably praised in Modern Painters by Ruskin, who commented that in ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St Praxed's Church’, Browning had put ‘nearly all that I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of the Stones of Venice into as many lines’ (Poems, 1.1093). The narrator in one of Browning's dramatic monologues usually speaks to an auditor within the poem, and inadvertently reveals his true nature to the reader through his words. The monologues internalize plot and deal with an interior conflict of which the speaker is frequently not consciously aware. As Browning said in the preface to Dramatic Lyrics, the poems in this genre are ‘for the most part Lyric in expression, always Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine’. In other words, the utterance by the fictitious speaker is lyric to the degree that it is expressive of self, and dramatic to the degree that it is suggestive of conflicting motives and tendencies. The dramatic monologue became the chief genre that Browning employed and experimented with for the remainder of his career, and in large part because of his skilful manipulation of its peculiar characteristics, it became one of the dominant genres employed by poets over the following century. Recognizing his young friend's amazing achievement, Walter Savage Landor published a poem in November 1845 attesting to Browning's majority, as having become a name to be listed, along with those of Chaucer and Shakespeare, among the greatest English writers.
Marriage and early life in Italy
Another poet, whom Browning had recently come to know, was equally enthusiastic. Elizabeth Barrett [see Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806–1861)], among the most famous poets of the day, had praised Browning's poetry in a journal article in 1842 and in one of her poems published in 1844. Browning was full of gratitude, and posted a letter to her on 10 January 1845 telling her that ‘I love your verse with all my heart ... and I love you too’ (Brownings' Correspondence, 10.17). She replied the next day thanking him for his letter and proclaiming herself ‘a devout admirer & student’ of his works (ibid., 10.19). Thereafter they began to exchange letters every few days.
Elizabeth Barrett fended off Browning's requests to visit her for some time, as she feared his reaction on seeing an ageing invalid some six years his senior confined to a sofa. But he persisted, and she finally allowed him to come to 50 Wimpole Street on 20 May 1845. He fell in love with her almost at first sight, as he told her in his letters. For her part, she could not believe that someone could love a seemingly incurable invalid and was also terrified that her tyrannical father, who had forbidden his children to marry, would learn about her admirer. But after many letters and visits, she was ready to declare her love for him in forthright terms in November 1845, although she told none of her friends or family. When, however, her father became suspicious of Robert's visits, she came to recognize her father as a despotic egoist and agreed to discuss the possibility of marriage.
One obstacle to marriage was money. Browning was completely dependent financially on his parents, but Elizabeth had inherited a fortune that yielded about £350 annually. Browning would not hear of taking any money from her and for a time considered several careers that he might take up. At last the money question was settled when he agreed that they would live on her income in Italy, where they proposed to go in part because of southern benefits for her health. He was adamant, however, that she must write a will bequeathing her property to her brothers and sisters.
The couple were married in St Marylebone Church on 12 September 1846 in the presence of two witnesses, Browning's cousin James Silverthorne and Elizabeth's maid, Wilson. Elizabeth returned home alone, with Robert not visiting her for the next few days. On 19 September the pair, joined by Wilson and Elizabeth's dog, Flush, fled to Paris, where they rested for several days; thence to Avignon and Marseilles; thence by ship to Leghorn; and finally by train to Pisa, where they arrived on 14 October.
In Pisa the Brownings found an apartment and settled in for winter 1846–7. Elizabeth's health immediately improved, but in March she suffered a miscarriage, which caused them both much grief. In mid-April they set out on a tour of northern Italy, and although they had intended to return to Pisa, they were so smitten by Florence that they decided to move there. They found an unfurnished apartment in Casa Guidi, opposite the Pitti Palace and a short walk from the Ponte Vecchio, and for the next thirteen years this was their home. They were so happy with their active life in Florence that for the next two years Browning devoted little time to writing. Their main interest during 1848–9 was the revolutionary fervour being manifested all over the continent. They had both espoused the Italian nationalist cause while in England, and now in Italy they became enthusiastic partisans of Italian liberty. They remained united in espousing the cause even after it began to fail in spring 1849. This is more than can be said for their views on Louis Napoleon's later coup d'état—Elizabeth saw it as an unfortunate necessity, but Browning detested the action. Admirably suited though they were in so many other ways, their differences on this particular political issue continued for the rest of their married life.
Amid all the military activity Elizabeth was pregnant, and gave birth to a son, Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning (soon called Pen), on 9 March 1849. Browning was delighted, yet his joy was diminished a few days later by letters from his sister announcing their mother's illness and then her death. To escape from his continuing sadness, the Brownings went to Bagni di Lucca. Yet Browning's despondency persisted, aggravated by his having nothing to do. Elizabeth showed him for the first time her Sonnets from the Portuguese, to be published in 1850, poems that she had written to him during their courtship. He was greatly appreciative, yet ashamed that he himself had written almost nothing. He had, however, published in two volumes with his new publishers, Chapman and Hall (Moxon being judged too slow), the first collection of his works, excluding the unfavourably received Pauline, Strafford, and Sordello.
Late in 1849 Browning began a new work, which he published as Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day the following spring. ‘Christmas-Eve’ is the dramatic narrative of a speaker in London on Christmas eve 1849 who enters a dissenting chapel to escape the rain. Therein he falls asleep and envisions several kinds of religious observance on that date, ending up with the belief that what he had regarded as absolute religious truth was truth only to him and that other modes of worship, other than his own dissenting one, have their own validity. While ‘Christmas-Eve’ is a monologue, ‘Easter-Day’ is the first of Browning's ‘parleyings’, a dialogue in which the poet divides himself up into two voices to express, through relation of a visionary experience in the past that may or may not be valid, how belief in the supremacy of the infinite resides in the perception of the infinite through the finite. The volume was respectfully but not widely reviewed, and after 200 copies had been sold within a fortnight of publication, the rest were remaindered, and were still being sold in the 1860s. On the other hand, Elizabeth, who was proposed by several journals to succeed Wordsworth as poet laureate on his death on 23 April 1850, had a new edition of her Poems in two volumes published in the autumn that received many reviews and enjoyed good sales.
Travels outside Italy, 1851–1852
In July 1850 Elizabeth suffered her fourth miscarriage, in the course of which she lost a large amount of blood. At her doctor's suggestion the Brownings rented a villa above Siena until November. By 1850 they had established an interesting circle of friends among the foreigners in Italy, mainly Englishmen and Americans. Yet by 1851, for all the liveliness of Florence, there remained the attraction of England and the friends and relatives whom they had not seen in almost five years. And so they returned for a visit, landing in London on 22 July 1851. They rented a house on Devonshire Street, within walking distance of the Barretts' home. Elizabeth and the baby called on her sisters and brothers when their father was out, while Browning spent long hours with his father and sister at New Cross, another suburb south of the Thames where the Brownings had lived since 1840. They also saw many old friends, and called on the Carlyles. John Kenyon, Elizabeth's relation who had supplemented her income by the gift of £100 annually after Pen was born, visited them frequently during their stay. Because of the Great Exhibition everything about London seemed lively, and they hated leaving.
But late in September, accompanied by Carlyle, the Brownings travelled to Paris, where they found lodgings on the Champs Elysées. They met a number of French literary figures, including George Sand, by whom Browning was appalled. More importantly, they met Joseph Milsand, a native of Dijon who had recently published a perceptive and laudatory article on Browning's poetry. Browning soon came to rely on Milsand's judgement, eventually even sending him proof sheets of his work for final revision before publication.
While in Paris, Browning was commissioned by Edward Moxon to write a preface to some letters by Shelley that he had purchased and proposed to publish. The ‘Essay on Shelley’, as it has come to be known, is Browning's major critical document. He had published another piece anonymously, on Thomas Chatterton, in 1842 in John Forster's Foreign Quarterly Review, but the essay on Shelley is far more important. In it Browning contrasts the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ poets. The objective poet is the ‘fashioner’, with the work so fashioned ‘substantive, projected from himself and distinct’. The subjective poet, by contrast, is the ‘seer’, with the work produced an ‘effluence’ that ‘cannot be easily considered in abstraction from his personality’ (Browning, ‘Essay on Shelley’, in Poems, 1.1001–2). Browning demonstrates that in cyclically alternating periods one or the other type of poet is dominant, and places Shelley firmly in the ‘subjective’ camp. The essay in part attempts to deal with the overwhelming legacy of the Romantics, and to articulate a useful role for the nineteenth-century poet. In support of this, Browning accords the objective poet at least equal status to the subjective by naming Shakespeare as its chief example. Ultimately, however, he maintains that there is no reason why the two modes of poetic faculty might not be combined into ‘the whole poet’ who fully displays the objective and subjective modes. Evidently, this was the kind of poet that Browning conceived himself to be. The collection of letters was published early in 1852, but the letters were soon discovered to be spurious and the book was suppressed.
The Brownings spent summer 1852 in London. Robert went there first because of a breach of promise and defamation of character suit that had been brought against his father by a widow to whom he had offered and then withdrawn a proposal of marriage. She won the suit, the court's judgment awarding her £800 in damages. Browning found his father and sister in deep depression, and to help them escape paying the damages he accompanied them to Paris in mid-July and saw them settled in an apartment. Later in July he and Elizabeth went to London, where they again saw old friends, met new ones, and cemented their friendship with the Tennysons, whom they had met in Paris the previous summer. They departed for Paris in October and by mid-November 1852 were home in Florence.
Life in Italy, 1853–1855, and Men and Women (1855)
Winter 1852–3 passed pleasantly. In summer 1853 the Brownings were again in Bagni di Lucca, where they re-encountered William Wetmore Story, an American sculptor, and his family, whom they had first met in 1848. The Storys, who by and large alternated between Rome and Florence, were highly cultivated and interesting people and were among the closest friends the Brownings made in Italy. In October, after many mutual visits in Bagni, both families returned to Florence and the next month went on to Rome, where the Storys arranged lodgings for the Brownings, and introduced then to interesting foreign circles. But Rome proved expensive, and tragically the Storys' son died. Their daughter also fell ill, and Pen was struck by the same disease; by late spring the Brownings gave up on Rome.
By early June 1854 the Brownings were back in Florence, where, settled into a more orderly routine, both set diligently to work. Robert had a certain stock of poems on hand to which he intended to add. Elizabeth continued to suffer from chest pains, however, and Browning was often in attendance on her as a result. In spite of this, he had managed to compose some 8000 lines of verse by June 1855. Rumours of cholera in a nearby neighbourhood meant that they left Florence soon after their return.
On 24 June the Brownings took an apartment in Paris in the same buil
