"Is Mr Browning an American ?" asked an English lady of the American ambassador.

"Is it possible that you ask me that ?" came the prompt and crushing retort; "why, there is not a village in the United States so small that they could not tell you that Robert Browning is an Englishman, and they wish he were an American." Spiritualism, in the main an American institution, became during the later years a centre of fervid interest to the one and an irritant to the other.

One turns gladly from that episode to their noble and helpful friendship for a magnificent old dying lion, with whom, as every one else discovered, it was ill to play--Walter Savage Landor.

Here it was the wife who looked on with critical though kindly sarcasm at what she thought her husband's generous excess of confidence.

Of all these intimacies and relationships, however, the poetry of these years discloses hardly a glimpse.