moved me, ever carried me away, as these poems of Browning's did. They literally transfixed me, magnetized me, like the spell of a magician. The reason was, of course, partly because the poetry is in itself so great; so intense, so penetrating, so vibrant with the living truth, so warm with human blood and passion; and I don't believe that any man could read it understandingly without being affected by it very much as I was. But the reason was also partly personal. In _The Ring and the Book_ I found expressed, in clear, straightforward language, all those deep, strenuous emotions which I myself had experienced in my love of you, which had always groped and struggled for expression, but which to me had always been inexpressible--yearnings which I had felt with all their force and ardor, which I had labored hard to speak, but which I had never been able to speak, any more than as if I had been dumb; which, pent up in my heart, and straining for an outlet, had sought one by means of broken syllables, glances, caresses. In _The Ring and the Book_ I found them expressed; found my own unutterable secrets uttered. Oh, if only when you and I were together I had had _The Ring and the Book_ to read aloud to you from! Then, perhaps, I could have made you feel how deeply, utterly, I loved you. In the _Inn Album_, too, another chapter of my own story was told, more of my own secrets were laid bare. The material conditions, the circumstances, the accidentals, to be sure, were totally different; but the essentials seemed to me the same. A man had irretrievably wronged a woman--a noble, beautiful woman, who loved him and trusted him. A lover had acted basely toward his sweetheart. And there, also, I found an expression for my remorse and my despair. But now I am anticipating. For the present these thoughts had not come to me--the thought of you, and of what had been between you and me, and of how I had wronged you. I mean to say, they had come to me after a fashion; now and then, spasmodically, by fits and starts; but they had not pierced more than skin-deep, and they had not taken fast hold. They had come and gone. Later on, they came and staid--like coals burning in my heart. For the present, I did a great deal of reading and scarcely any thinking. Sometimes, it is true, instead of reading, I would sit still, looking out of the window, and carrying on a certain mental process which might perhaps have been called thinking: but it was the sort of thinking known as mooning. I mean it was vague, listless, purposeless; it had no vigor, no point; and it bore no result. You, and our love, and the misery I had caused you, were the subjects of it, yes; but it was like thinking in a fog. It had not grown intense and clear. It had not crystallized. It awoke in my breast a sort of sluggish, languid melancholy, instead of the pain that I ought to have felt, and by and by did feel--and feel now, and so long as I live shall feel.