"For many years," we are told by Mr Gosse, "he was careful never to pass her house in Delamere Terrace." Although not prone to superstition, he had noted in July 1863 a dream of Miss Barrett in which she imagined herself asking her dead sister Elizabeth, "When shall I be with you ?" and received the answer, "Dearest, in five years." "Only a coincidence," he adds in a letter to Miss Blagden, "but noticeable." That summer, after wanderings in France, Browning and his sister settled at Audierne, on the extreme westerly point of Brittany, "a delightful, quite unspoiled little fishing town," with the ocean in front and green lanes and hills behind.

It was in every way an eventful year.

In the autumn his new publishers, Smith, Elder & Co., produced the six-volume edition of his Poetical Works, on the title-page of which the author describes himself as "Robert Browning, M.A., Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford." The distinction, partly due to Jowett's influence, had been conferred a year previously.

In 1865, Browning, who desired that his son should be educated at Oxford, first became acquainted with Jowett.

Acquaintance quickly ripened into friendship, which was not the less genuine or cordial because Jowett had but a qualified esteem for Browning's poems.
"Ought one to admire one's friend's poetry ?" was a difficult question of casuistry which the Master of Balliol at one time proposed.