Browning could be fairly violent, as we know, both in poetry and conversation; but it would be almost too terrible to conjecture what he would have felt and said if Mr.Home's wreath had alighted on his head.
Next day, according to Home's account, he called on the hostess of the previous night in what the writer calls "a ridiculous state of excitement," and told her apparently that she must excuse him if he and his wife did not attend any more gatherings of the kind.

What actually occurred is not, of course, quite easy to ascertain, for the account in Home's _Memoirs_ principally consists of noble speeches made by the medium which would seem either to have reduced Browning to a pulverised silence, or else to have failed to attract his attention.
But there can be no doubt that the general upshot of the affair was that Browning put his foot down, and the experiments ceased.

There can be little doubt that he was justified in this; indeed, he was probably even more justified if the experiments were genuine psychical mysteries than if they were the _hocus-pocus_ of a charlatan.

He knew his wife better than posterity can be expected to do; but even posterity can see that she was the type of woman so much adapted to the purposes of men like Home as to exhibit almost invariably either a great craving for such experiences or a great terror of them.

Like many geniuses, but not all, she lived naturally upon something like a borderland; and it is impossible to say that if Browning had not interposed when she was becoming hysterical she might not have ended in an asylum.
The whole of this incident is very characteristic of Browning; but the real characteristic note in it has, as above suggested, been to some extent missed.