for himself; had “never so much to do or so little pleasure in doing it.”  The discomfort of London lodgings was before long exchanged for the more congenial surroundings of a house by the water-side in Warwick Crescent, which he occupied until 1887, two years before his death.  The furniture and tapestries of Casa Guidi gave it an air of comfort and repose.  “It was London,” writes Mrs Ritchie, referring to her visits of a later date, “but London touched by some indefinite romance; the canal used to look cool and deep, the green trees used to shade the Crescent....  The house was an ordinary London house, but the carved oak furniture and tapestries gave dignity to the long drawing-rooms, and pictures and books lined the stairs.  In the garden at the back dwelt, at the time of which I am writing, two weird gray geese, with quivering silver wings and long throats, who used to come and meet their master hissing and fluttering.”  In 1866 an owl—­for Browning still indulged a fantasy of his own in the choice of pets—­was “the light of our house,” as a letter describes this bird of darkness, “for his tameness and engaging ways.”  The bird would kiss its master on the face, tweak his hair, and if one said “Poor old fellow!” in a commiserating voice would assume a sympathetic air of depression.[86] Miss Barrett lived hard by, in Delamere Terrace.  With her on Sundays Browning listened at Bedford Chapel to the sermons of a non-conformist preacher, Thomas Jones, to some of which when published in 1884, he prefixed an introduction.  “The Welsh poet-preacher” was a man of humble origin possessed of a natural gift of eloquence, which, with his “liberal humanity,” drew Browning to become a hearer of his discourses.

He made no haste to give the public a new volume of verse.  Mrs Browning had mentioned to a correspondent, not long before her death, that her husband had then a considerable body of lyrical poetry in a state of completion.  An invitation to accept the editorship of the Cornhill Magazine, on Thackeray’s retirement, was after some hesitation declined.  He was now partly occupied with preparing for the press whatever writings by his wife seemed suitable for publication.  In 1862 he issued with a dedication “to grateful Florence” her Last Poems; in 1863, her Greek Christian Poets; in 1865 he prepared a volume of Selections from her poems, and had the happiness of knowing that the number of her readers had rather increased than diminished.  The efforts of self-constituted biographers to make capital out of the incidents of her life, and to publish such letters of hers as could be laid hands on, moved him to transports of indignation, which break forth in a letter to his friend Miss Blagden with unmeasured violence:  what he felt with the “paws” of these blackguards in his “very bowels” God knows; beast and scamp and knave and fool are terms hardly strong enough to relieve his wrath.  Such sudden whirls of extreme rage were rare, yet were characteristic of Browning, and