So early as 1858 Mrs. Hawthorne believed she saw the heralds of death in Mrs. Browning's excessive pallor and the hectic flush upon the cheeks, in her extreme fragility and weakness, and in her catching, fluttering breath. Even the motion of a visitor's fan perturbed her. But "her soul was mighty, and a great love kept her on earth a season longer. She was a seraph in her flaming worship of heart." "She lives so ardently," adds Mrs. Hawthorne, "that her delicate earthly vesture must soon be burnt up and destroyed by her soul of pure fire."
Yet, notwithstanding, she still sailed the seas of life, like one of those fragile argonauts in their shells of foam and rainbow-mist which will withstand the rude surge of winds and waves. But slowly, gradually, the spirit was o'erfretting its tenement. With the waning of her strength came back the old passionate longing for rest, for quiescence from that "excitement from within," which had been almost over vehement for her in the calm days of her unmarried life.
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 Personæ," 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--