[Footnote 39: His father beautifully said of Mrs Browning's portrait that it was a face which made the worship of saints seem possible.] The altered situation became apparent on the publication, in rapid succession, in 1864, of Browning's _Dramatis Personæ_ and Mr Swinburne's _Atalanta in Calydon_. Both volumes found their most enthusiastic readers at the universities. "All my new cultivators are young men," Browning wrote to Miss Blagden; adding, with a touch of malicious humour, "more than that, I observe that some of my old friends don't like at all the irruption of outsiders who rescue me from their sober and private approval, and take those words out of their mouths which they 'always meant to say,' and never did." The volume included practically all that Browning had actually written since 1855,--less than a score of pieces,--the somewhat slender harves of nine years. But during these later years in Italy, as we have seen, he had done little at his art; and after his return much time had been occupied in projecting the great scheme of that which figures in his familiar letters as his "murder-poem," and was ultimately known as _The Ring and the Book_. As a whole, the _Dramatis Personæ_ stands yet more clearly apart from _Men and Women_ than that does from all that had gone before. Both books contain some of his most magnificent work; but the earlier is full of summer light and glow, the later breathes the hectic and poignant splendour of autumn. The sense of tragic loss broods over all its music. In lyric strength and beauty there is no decay; but the dramatic imagination has certainly lost somewhat of its flexible strength and easy poise of wing: falling back now upon the personal convictions of the poet, now upon the bald prose of daily life. _Rabbi ben Ezra_ and _Abt Vogler, A Death in the Desert_, are as noble poetry as _Andrea del Sarto_ or _The Grammarian's Funeral_; but it is a poetry less charged with the "incidents" of any other soul than his own; and, on the other hand, _Dis Aliter Visum_ and _Youth and Art_, and others, effective as they are, yet move in an atmosphere less remote from prose than any of the songs and lays of love which form one of the chief glories of _Men and Women_. The world which is neither thrillingly beautiful nor grotesquely ugly, but simply poor, unendowed, humdrum, finds for the first time a place in his poetry. Its blankness answered too well to the desolate regard which in the early 'Sixties he turned upon life. The women are homely, even plain, like James Lee's wife, with her "coarse hands and hair," and Edith in _Too Late_, with her thin, odd features, or mediocre, like the speaker in _Dis Aliter Visum_; and they have homely names, like "Lee" or "Lamb" or "Brown," not gratuitously grotesque ones like Blougram, Blouphocks, or the outrageous "Gigadibs." "Sludge" stands on a different footing; for it is dramatically expressive, as these are not. The legend of the gold-haired