Become my universe that feels and knows.
--_Epilogue_.


The catastrophe of June 29, 1861, closed with appalling suddenness the
fifteen years' married life of Browning. "I shall grow still, I hope,"
he wrote to Miss Haworth, a month later, "but my root is taken, and
remains." The words vividly express the valour in the midst of
desolation which animated one little tried hitherto by sorrow. The
Italian home was shattered, and no thought of even attempting a
patched-up existence in its ruined walls seems to have occurred to him;
even the neighbourhood of the spot in which all that was mortal of her
had been laid had no power to detain him. But his departure was no mere
flight from scenes intolerably dear. He had their child to educate and
his own life to fulfil, and he set himself with grim resolution to the
work, as one who had indeed _had everything_, but who was as little
inclined to abandon himself to the past as to forget it. After visiting
his father in Paris--the "dear _nonno_" of his wife's charming
letters[39]--he settled in London, at first in lodgings, then at the
house in Warwick Crescent which was for a quarter of a century to be his
home. Something of that dreary first winter found its way, ten years
later, through whatever dramatic disguise, into the poignant epilogue of
_Fifine_. Browning had been that "Householder," had gone through the
dragging days and nights,--

"All the fuss and trouble of street-sounds, window-sights,
All the worry of flapping door and echoing roof; and then
All the fancies,"--

perhaps, among them, that of the "knock, call, cry," and the pang and