'At the same time, his treatment in England affects him, naturally, and for my part I set it down as an infamy of that public--no other word. He says he has told you some things you had not heard, and which I acknowledge I always try to prevent him from repeating to anyone. I wonder if he has told you besides (no, I fancy not) that an English lady of rank, an acquaintance of ours, (observe that!) asked, the other day, the American minister, whether "Robert was not an American." The minister answered--"is it possible that _you_ ask me this? Why, there is not so poor a village in the United States, where they would not tell you that Robert Browning was an Englishman, and that they were sorry he was not an American." Very pretty of the American minister, was it not?--and literally true, besides. . . . Ah, dear Sarianna--I don't complain for myself of an unappreciating public. I _have no reason_. But, just for _that_ reason, I complain more about Robert--only he does not hear me complain--to _you_ I may say, that the blindness, deafness and stupidity of the English public to Robert are amazing. Of course Milsand had heard his name--well the contrary would have been strange. Robert _is_. All England can't prevent his existence, I suppose. But nobody there, except a small knot of pre-Raffaellite men, pretend to do him justice. Mr. Forster has done the best,--in the press. As a sort of lion, Robert has his range in society--and--for the rest, you should see Chapman's returns!--While, in America he is a power, a writer, a poet--he is read--he lives in the hearts of the people. '"Browning readings" here in Boston--"Browning evenings" there. For the rest, the English hunt lions, too, Sarianna, but their lions are chiefly chosen among lords and railway kings. . . .' We cannot be surprised at Mrs. Browning's desire for a more sustained literary activity on her husband's part. We learn from his own subsequent correspondence that he too regarded the persevering exercise of his poetic faculty as almost a religious obligation. But it becomes the more apparent that the restlessness under which he was now labouring was its own excuse; and that its causes can have been no mystery even to those 'outside' him. The life and climate of Italy were beginning to undermine his strength. We owe it perhaps to the great and sorrowful change, which was then drawing near, that the full power of work returned to him.