The idea of personality as a quickening, regenerating power, and the idea of art as an intermediate agency of personality, are, perhaps, the most reiterated (implicitly, not explicitly) in Browning’s poetry, and lead up to the dominant idea of Christianity, the idea of a Divine Personality; the idea that the soul, to use an expression from his earliest poem, ‘Pauline’, must “rest beneath some better essence than itself in weakness”. The notes to the poems will be found, I trust, to cover all points and features of the text which require explanation and elucidation. I have not, at any rate, wittingly passed by any real difficulties. Whether my explanations and interpretations will in all cases be acceptable, remains to be seen. Hiram Corson. Cascadilla Cottage, Ithaca, N.Y. September, 1886. Note to the Second Edition. In this edition, several errors of the first have been corrected. For the notes on “fifty-part canon”, p. 156, and “a certain precious little tablet”, p. 232, I am indebted to Mr. Browning. H. C. {p. 156--in this etext, see line 322 of “The Flight of the Duchess”, in the Poems section. p. 232--see Stanza 30 of “Old Pictures in Florence”, also in the Poems section.} 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.”