M. Milsand was one of the few readers of Browning with whom I have talked about him, who had studied his work from the beginning, and had realized the ambition of his first imaginative flights. He was more perplexed by the poet's utterance in later years. 'Quel homme extraordinaire!' he once said to me; 'son centre n'est pas au milieu.' The usual criticism would have been that, while his own centre was in the middle, he did not seek it in the middle for the things of which he wrote; but I remember that, at the moment in which the words were spoken, they impressed me as full of penetration. Mr. Browning had so much confidence in M. Milsand's linguistic powers that he invariably sent him his proof-sheets for final revision, and was exceedingly pleased with such few corrections as his friend was able to suggest. With the name of Milsand connects itself in the poet's life that of a younger, but very genuine friend of both, M. Gustave Dourlans: a man of fine critical and intellectual powers, unfortunately neutralized by bad health. M. Dourlans also became a visitor at Warwick Crescent, and a frequent correspondent of Mr. or rather of Miss Browning. He came from Paris once more, to witness the last sad scene in Westminster Abbey. The first three years of Mr. Browning's married life had been unproductive from a literary point of view. The realization and enjoyment of the new companionship, the duties as well as interests of the dual existence, and, lastly, the shock and pain of his mother's death, had absorbed his mental energies for the time being. But by the close of 1848 he had prepared for publication in the following year a new edition of 'Paracelsus' and the 'Bells and Pomegranates' poems. The reprint was in two volumes, and the publishers were Messrs. Chapman and Hall; the system, maintained through Mr. Moxon, of publication at the author's expense, being abandoned by Mr. Browning when he left home. Mrs. Browning writes of him on this occasion that he is paying 'peculiar attention to the objections made against certain obscurities.' He himself prefaced the edition by these words: 'Many of these pieces were out of print, the rest had been withdrawn from circulation, when the corrected edition, now submitted to the reader, was prepared. The various Poems and Dramas have received the author's most careful revision. December 1848.' In 1850, in Florence, he wrote 'Christmas Eve and Easter Day'; and in December 1851, in Paris, the essay on Shelley, to be prefixed to twenty-five supposed letters of that poet, published by Moxon in 1852.* * They were discovered, not long afterwards, to be spurious, and the book suppressed.