Note to the Third Edition.



In this edition have been added, `A Death in the Desert',
with argument, notes, and commentary, a fac-simile of a letter
from the poet, and a portrait copied from a photograph
(the last taken of him) which he gave me when visiting him in Venice,
a month before his death.

It may be of interest, and of some value, to many students
of Browning's poetry, to know a reply he made, in regard to
the expression in `My Last Duchess', "I gave commands; then all smiles
stopped together."

We were walking up and down the great hall of the Palazzo Rezzonico,
when, in the course of what I was telling him about the study
of his works in the United States, I alluded to the divided opinion
as to the meaning of the above expression in `My Last Duchess',
some understanding that the commands were to put the Duchess to death,
and others, as I have explained the expression on p. 87 of this volume
(last paragraph). He made no reply, for a moment, and then said, meditatively, "Yes, I meant that the commands were that she should be put to death."
And then, after a pause, he added, with a characteristic dash
of expression, and as if the thought had just started in his mind,
"Or he might have had her shut up in a convent." This was to me
very significant. When he wrote the expression, "I gave commands",
etc., he may not have thought definitely what the commands were,
more than that they put a stop to the smiles of the sweet Duchess,