Its blankness answered too well to the desolate regard which in the early 'Sixties he turned upon life.

The women are homely, even plain, like James Lee's wife, with her "coarse hands and hair," and Edith in _Too Late_, with her thin, odd features, or mediocre, like the speaker in _Dis Aliter Visum_; and they have homely names, like "Lee" or "Lamb" or "Brown," not gratuitously grotesque ones like Blougram, Blouphocks, or the outrageous "Gigadibs." "Sludge" stands on a different footing; for it is dramatically expressive, as these are not.

The legend of the gold-haired maiden of Pornic is told with a touch of harsher cynicism than was heard in Galuppi's "chill" music of the vanished beauties of Venice.

If we may by no means say that the glory of humanity has faded for Browning, yet its glory has become more fugitive and more extrinsic,--a "grace not theirs" brought by love "settling unawares" upon minds "level and low, burnt and bare" in themselves.

And he dwells now on desolate and desert scenes with a new persistence, just as it was wild primitive nooks of the French coast which now became his chosen summer resorts in place of the semi-civic rusticity which had been his choice in Italy.