He ceased even to read; "nothing but clay does he care for," says Mrs Browning smilingly, "poor lost soul." The union of intellectual energy with physical effort in such work gave him the complete satisfaction for which he craved.

His wife "grudged a little," she says, the time stolen from his special art of poetry; but she saw that his health and spirits gained from his happy occupation.

Of late, he had laboured irregularly at verse; fits of active effort were followed by long intervals during which production seemed impossible.

And some vent was necessary for the force coiled up within him; if this were not to be obtained, he wore himself out with a nervous impatience--"beating his dear head," as Mrs Browning describes it, "against the wall, simply because he sees a fly there, magnified by his own two eyes almost indefinitely into some Saurian monster." Now he was well and even exultant--"nothing ever," he declared, "made him so happy before." Of advancing years--Browning was now nearly forty-nine--the only symptoms were that he had lost his youthful slightness of figure, and that his beard and hair were somewhat blanched by time.

"The women," his wife wrote to his sister, "adore him everywhere far too much for decency," and to herself he seemed "infinitely handsomer and more attractive" than when, sixteen years previously, she had first seen him.