It was an incident in Browning's life that when he was producing his most glorious work and receiving the admiration and intelligent appreciation of his poetical wife, he was a very insignificant figure in English literature of the day. Mrs. Browning was indignant over the neglect her husband suffered, and in her letters drew sharp comparison between the attention paid Browning in America and the neglect he received in England. Meanwhile, whether living in Florence or sojourning in Paris or London, a choice company was always to be found welcoming and honoring the two poets. Mr. and Mrs. Story, the Hawthornes, Cardinal Manning, Massimo d'Azeglio, Sir Frederick Leighton, Mr. Odo Russell, Rossetti, Val Prinsep, Forster, Landor, Fanny Kemble,--these are some of the names closely associated with that of the Brownings in this period. The death of Mrs. Browning, June 29, 1861, closed this most beautiful human companionship. It made also a great change in Browning's habit of life, and no doubt affected in important ways his poetical productiveness. He left Italy for England. He became absorbed, so far as personal responsibilities went, in the education of his son. By some strange caprice, he chose to make his home in an ugly part of London, and he approached it through a region of disorder and squalor. But he also, with his robust nature, denied himself the luxury of a persistent solitariness, and little by little returned to society, especially grateful for the friendship of women like Miss Isa Blagden, who stepped in at the moment of his descent into the valley of grief with their gentle ministrations. The months that followed Mrs. Browning's death were in a way given to taking up again dropped threads of work, and to intellectual occupations, which both satisfied and stimulated his nature. He read Euripides again, perhaps in part because of the association in his mind with his wife's scholarly interests. He resumed the poems on which he had been engaged in the last months at Casa Guidi, and he pondered over his _magnum opus_, the germ of which had been in his mind for many months. But first, in 1863, he saw through the press a new and complete collection of his poetical works in three volumes. Then, the year following, he gathered the poems which immediately preceded and followed Mrs. Browning's death into the volume of _Dramatis Personæ_. The reissue of his older poems and this new accession were accompanied by a clear re-enforcement of his position as an English poet. He had come, too, to the point where volumes of selections from his work were in demand, a pretty good sign of a widening of his audience. Other signs followed. In 1867 he received the honorary degree of M. A. from the University of Oxford, and a few months later was made honorary fellow of Balliol College. In the year following he was asked to stand for the Lord Rectorship of the University of St. Andrews, rendered vacant by the death of J. S. Mill.