Moreover, the immense vogue won by the poetry of his wife undoubtedly prepared the way for his more difficult but kindred work.

If _Pippa Passes_ counts for something in _Aurora Leigh, Aurora Leigh_ in its turn trained the future readers of _The Ring and the Book_.
[Footnote 39: His father beautifully said of Mrs Browning's portrait that it was a face which made the worship of saints seem possible.] The altered situation became apparent on the publication, in rapid succession, in 1864, of Browning's _Dramatis Personae_ and Mr Swinburne's _Atalanta in Calydon_.

Both volumes found their most enthusiastic readers at the universities.

"All my new cultivators are young men," Browning wrote to Miss Blagden; adding, with a touch of malicious humour, "more than that, I observe that some of my old friends don't like at all the irruption of outsiders who rescue me from their sober and private approval, and take those words out of their mouths which they 'always meant to say,' and never did." The volume included practically all that Browning had actually written since 1855,--less than a score of pieces,--the somewhat slender harves of nine years.

But during these later years in Italy, as we have seen, he had done little at his art; and after his return much time had been occupied in projecting the great scheme of that which figures in his familiar letters as his "murder-poem," and was ultimately known as _The Ring and the Book_.