It is significant that at this time Browning’s genius was relatively dormant.  Its wings were resting for the long-sustained flight of “The Ring and the Book,” and for earlier and shorter though not less royal aerial journeyings.  But also, no doubt, the prolonged comparatively unproductive period of eight or nine years (1855-1864), between the publication of “Men and Women” and “Dramatis Personae,” was due in some measure to the poet’s incessant and anxious care for his wife, to the deep sorrow of witnessing her slow but visible passing away, and to the profound grief occasioned by her death.  However, barrenness of imaginative creative activity can be only very relatively affirmed, even of so long a period, of years wherein were written such memorable and treasurable poems as ‘James Lee’s Wife,’ among Browning’s writings what ‘Maud’ is among Lord Tennyson’s; ‘Gold Hair:  a Legend of Pornic;’ ’Dis Aliter Visum;’ ‘Abt Vogler,’ the most notable production of its kind in the language; ‘A Death in the Desert,’ that singular and impressive study; ‘Caliban upon Setebos,’ in its strange potency of interest and stranger poetic note, absolutely unique; ‘Youth and Art;’ ’Apparent Failure;’ ‘Prospice,’ that noble lyrical defiance of death; and the supremely lofty and significant series of weighty stanzas, ’Rabbi Ben Ezra,’ the most quintessential of all the distinctively psychical monologues which Browning has written.  It seems to me that if these two poems only, “Prospice” and “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” were to survive to the day of Macaulay’s New Zealander, the contemporaries of that meditative traveller would have sufficient to enable them to understand the great fame of the poet of “dim ancestral days,” as the more acute among them could discern something of the real Shelley, though time had preserved but the three lines—­

“Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child” ...

something of the real Catullus, through the mists of remote antiquity, if there had not perished the single passionate cry—­

                               “Lesbia illa,
      Illa Lesbia, quam Catullus unam
      Plus quam se, atque suos amavit omnes!”

At the beginning of July (1858), the Brownings left Florence for the summer and autumn, and by easy stages travelled to Normandy.  Here the invalid benefited considerably at first:  and here, I may add, Browning wrote his ‘Legend of Pornic,’ ‘Gold-Hair.’  This poem of twenty-seven five-line stanzas (which differs only from that in more recent “Collected Works,” and “Selections,” in its lack of the three stanzas now numbered xxi., xxii., and xxiii.) was printed for limited private circulation, though primarily for the purpose of securing American copyright.  Browning several times printed single poems thus, and for the same reasons—­that is, either for transatlantic copyright, or when the verses were not likely to be included in any volume