The mood described ten years later in the Prologue to _Asolando_ was already dominant: the iris glow of youth no longer glorified every common object of the natural world, but "a flower was just a flower." The glory still came by moments; some of his most thrilling outbursts of song belong to this time.

But he built up no more great poems.

He was approaching seventy, and it might well seem that if so prolific a versifier was not likely to become silent his poetry was rapidly resolving itself into wastes of theological argument, of grotesque posturing, or intellectualised anecdotage.

The _Dramatic Idyls_ of 1879 and 1880 showed that these more serious forebodings were at least premature.

There was little enough in them, no doubt, of the qualities traditionally connected with "idyll." Browning habitually wore his rue with a difference, and used familiar terms in senses of his own.
There is nothing here of "enchanted reverie" or leisurely pastoralism.
Browning's "idyls" are studies in life's moments of stress and strain, not in its secluded pleasances and verdurous wooded ways.