He had their child to educate and his own life to fulfil, and he set himself with grim resolution to the work, as one who had indeed _had everything_, but who was as little inclined to abandon himself to the past as to forget it.

After visiting his father in Paris--the "dear _nonno_" of his wife's charming letters[39]--he settled in London, at first in lodgings, then at the house in Warwick Crescent which was for a quarter of a century to be his home.

Something of that dreary first winter found its way, ten years later, through whatever dramatic disguise, into the poignant epilogue of _Fifine_.

Browning had been that "Householder," had gone through the dragging days and nights,-- "All the fuss and trouble of street-sounds, window-sights, All the worry of flapping door and echoing roof; and then All the fancies,"-- perhaps, among them, that of the "knock, call, cry," and the pang and rapture of the visionary meeting.

Certainly one of the effects of his loss was to accentuate the mood of savage isolation which lurked beneath Browning's genial sociality.