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At Villers, in 1875, he only corrected the proofs of 'The Inn Album' for publication in November. When the party started for the Isle of Arran, in the autumn of 1876, the 'Pacchiarotto' volume had already appeared. When Mr. Browning discontinued his short-lived habit of visiting away from home, he made an exception in favour of the Universities.
None of them are London poems, and Italy is for the present almost forgotten; it is the scene of only two or three short pieces, which are included in the volume of 1876 Pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper; with other Poems.
The Pacchiarotto volume of 1876 was the first collection of miscellaneous poetry put forth by Browning since the appearance, twelve years previously, of Dramatis Personae There is, of course, throughout the whole the presence of a vigorous personality; we can in an occasional mood tumble and toss even in the rough verse of Pacchiarotto, as we do on a choppy sea on which the sun is a-shine, and which invigorates while it not always agreeably bobs our head, and dashes down our throat.
He was inclined to hold by the simple certainties of our present life and to be content with these as provisional truths, or as temporary illusions which lead on towards the truth. In the Pisgah Sights of the Pacchiarotto volume he had imagined this mood of acquiescence as belonging to the hour of death.
It was published in the early summer of 1873. London Life Love of Music Miss Egerton-Smith Periodical Nervous Exhaustion Mers; 'Aristophanes' Apology' 'Agamemnon' 'The Inn Album' 'Pacchiarotto and other Poems' Visits to Oxford and Cambridge Letters to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald St.
The volume entitled Pacchiarotto, moreover, includes one or two of the most spirited poems on the subject of the poet in relation to publicity "At the Mermaid," "House," and "Shop."
Browning takes the same attitude in Sordello, contrasting Eglamor, the versifier who servilely conformed to the taste of the mob, with Sordello, the true poet, who despised it. In Popularity, Browning returns to the same theme, of the public's misplaced praises, and in Pacchiarotto he outdoes himself in heaping ridicule upon his readers.
He was certainly one of those somewhat rare men who are fierily ambitious both in large things and in small. He prided himself on re-establishing optimism on a new foundation, and it is to be presumed, though it is somewhat difficult to imagine, that he prided himself on such rhymes as the following in Pacchiarotto:
Two of the volumes are narrative poems, each tending to a tragic crisis; Red Cotton Night-Cap Country is a story entangled with questions relating to religion; The Inn Album is a tragedy of the passion of love. The volume of 1876, Pacchiarotto with other Poems, is the miscellaneous gathering of lyrical and narrative pieces which had come into being during a period of many years.
This perverse poem was the last as well as the first manifestation of an ungenial mood of Mr. Browning's mind. A slight exception may be made for some passages in 'Red Cotton Nightcap Country', and for one of the poems of the 'Pacchiarotto' volume; but otherwise no sign of moral or mental disturbance betrays itself in his subsequent work.