Volumes of selections from the poems of both Browning and his wife were now being demanded for the "Golden Treasury"; and to Miss Blagden Browning says further that he will certainly do the utmost to make the most of himself before he dies, "for one reason that I may help Pen the better."
Browning complies with his publisher's request to prepare a new selection of his wife's poems. "How I have done it, I can hardly say," he noted, "but it is one dear delight that the work of her goes on more effectually than ever--her books are more and more read,"--and a new edition of her "Aurora Leigh" was exhausted within a few months.
The winter was a very full and engaging one. On one evening he dined at the deanery of St. Paul's, Sir John Lubbock and Tennyson being also guests, but the Stanleys, who were invited, were not present. At another dinner the poets met, Tennyson recording: "Mr. Browning gave me an affectionate greeting after all these years," and Browning writing to a friend: "... I have enjoyed nothing so much as a dinner last week with Tennyson, who with his wife and one son is staying in town for a few weeks, and she is just what she was and always will be, very sweet and dear: he seems to me better than ever. I met him at a large party ... also at Carlyle's...."
In May of 1866 Browning's father was in poor health, and on June 14 he died, at his home in Paris, his son having arrived three days before. Although nearly eighty-five years of age, the elder Browning had retained all his clearness of mind, and only just before he passed away he had responded to some question of his son regarding a disputed point in medieval history with "a regular book-full of notes and extracts." His son speaks of the aged man's "strange sweetness of soul," apparently a transmitted trait, for the poet shared it, and has left it in liberal heritage to his son, Robert Barrett Browning, the "Pen" of all these pages. Of his father the poet said:
"He was worthy of being Ba's father,--out of the whole world, only he, so far as my experience goes. She loved him, and he said very recently, while gazing at her portrait, that only that picture had put into his head that there might be such a thing as the worship of the images of saints."