The Two Poets of Croisic, published with La Saisiaz, cannot be detached from it.  The opening words take up the theme of “Fame,” there half mockingly played with, and the whole poem is a sarcastic criticism of the worship of Fame.  The stories of Rene Gentilhomme and Paul Desfarges Maillard are told with an immense burly vivacity, in the stanza, and a Browningesque version of the manner, of Beppo.  Both stories turned upon those decisive moments which habitually caught Browning’s eye.  Only, in their case, the decisive moment was not one of the revealing crises which laid bare their utmost depths, but a crisis which temporarily invested them with a capricious effulgence.  Yet these instantaneous transformations have a peculiar charm for Browning; they touch and fall in with his fundamental ideas of life; and the delicious prologue and epilogue hint these graver analogies in a dainty music which pleasantly relieves the riotous uncouthness of the tale itself.  If Rene’s life is suddenly lighted up, so is the moss bank with the “blue flash” of violets in spring; and the diplomatic sister through whose service Paul wins his laurels has a more spiritual comrade in the cicada, who, with her little heart on fire, sang forth the note of the broken string and won her singer his prize.  Browning’s pedestrian verse passes into poetry as he disengages from the transient illusions, the flickerings and bickerings, of Fame, the eternal truth of Love.  But it is only in the closing stanzas of the main poem that his thought clearly emerges; when, having exposed the vanity of fame as a test of poetic merit, he asks how, then, poets shall be tried; and lays down the characteristic criterion, a happy life.  But it is the happiness of Rabbi ben Ezra, a joy three parts pain, the happiness won not by ignoring evil but by mastering it!—­

     “So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force: 
        What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer
      The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse
        Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer
      Sluggish and safe!  Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse,
        Despair:  but ever mid the whirling fear
      Let, through the tumult, break the poet’s face
      Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race!”

CHAPTER VIII.

THE LAST DECADE.

      Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiled.

Since the catastrophe of 1861 Browning had not entered Italy.  In the autumn of 1878 he once more bent his steps thither.  Florence, indeed, he refused to revisit; it was burnt in upon his brain by memories intolerably dear.  But in Venice the charm of Italy reasserted itself, and he returned during his remaining autumns with increasing frequency to the old-fashioned hostelry, Dell’ Universo, on the Grand Canal, or latterly, to the second home provided by the hospitality of his gifted and congenial American friend, Mrs Arthur