You supposed that few or none had known and loved you in the world: May be! flower that's full-blown tempts the butterfly, not flower that's furled. But more learned sense unlocked you, loosed the sheath and let expand Bud to bell and out-spread flower-shape at the least warm touch of hand --Maybe, throb of heart, beneath which,--quickening farther than it knew,-- Treasure oft was disembosomed, scent all strange and unguessed hue. Disembosomed, re-embosomed,--must one memory suffice, Prove I knew an Alpine-rose which all beside named Edelweiss? (ll. 123-130.) At the time of the chief intercourse between the two friends, Browning's health rendered it necessary for him to leave England during a part of each year, and for four successive summers Miss Egerton-Smith had been the companion of the brother and sister in their foreign sojourns, when that of 1877 was interrupted by her sudden death from heart disease on the night of September 14th. The villa "La Saisiaz" (in the Savoyard dialect "the Sun"), at which the party was staying, was situated above Geneva, and almost immediately beneath La Salève, the summit of which was the destination of the expedition occupying Miss Egerton-Smith's thoughts at the time of her death. The shock to her friends was wholly unexpected, as she had been in better health than was usual to her during the days immediately preceding. To Browning it would appear to have been at first overwhelming. It was not long, however, before the emotional and intellectual faculties were sufficiently under control to render the arguments of _La Saisiaz_ a possibility. When he added the concluding lines in "London's mid-November," only six weeks had elapsed since that "summons" in the Swiss village which had meant for him temporary bereavement of affection and friendship. _A._ The first 400 lines of the poem proper--exclusive of the prologue--constitute a prelude to the formal debate conducted between Fancy and Reason, designed as a rational and logical course of argument by which the writer would assure himself of the immortality of the soul as a no less reasonable hypothesis than is the self-evident fact of the mortality of the body: that the assumption with which instinct forces him to start is also the goal to which reason ultimately draws him. The assumption-- That's Collonge, henceforth your dwelling. All the same, howe'er disjoints Past from present, no less certain you are here, not there. (ll. 24-25.) The conclusion--that even though O'er our heaven again cloud closes ... Hope the arrowy, just as constant, comes to pierce its gloom. (ll. 542-543.) Line 44 may be not unfitly taken as significant of the whole course of thought What will be the morning glory, when at dusk thus gleams the lake?