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Updated: June 13, 2025
Happily the winter was of a miraculous mildness. Mrs Browning worked Aurora Leigh in "a sort of furia," and Browning set himself to the task a fruitless one as it proved of rehandling and revising Sordello: "I lately gave time and pains," he afterwards told Milsand in his published dedication of the poem, "to turn my work into what the many might, instead of what the few must like: but after all I imagined another thing at first, and therefore leave as I find it" proud but warrantable words.
Chief among friendships was that with Joseph Milsand of Dijon, whose name is connected with Sordello in the edition of Browning's "Poetical Works" of the year 1863.
Browning was the guest of Mr. Ernest Benzon: having left his sister to the care of M. and Madame Milsand at St.-Aubin. The ailment he speaks of consisted, I believe, of a severe cold. Another of the occurrences of 1871 was Mr. Browning's election as Life Governor of the London University.
A passage from a letter dated March 30, '72, bears striking testimony to the constant warmth of his affections. . . . The misfortune, which I did not guess when I accepted the invitation, is that I shall lose some of the last days of Milsand, who has been here for the last month: no words can express the love I have for him, you know.
In the summer of 1869 he wandered with his son and his sister, in company with his friends of Italian days, the Storys, in Scotland, and at Lock Luichart Lodge visited Lady Ashburton. Three summers, those of 1870, 1872 and 1873 were spent at Saint-Aubin, a wild "un-Murrayed" village on the coast of Normandy, where Milsand occupied a little cottage hard by.
Browning was not a superstitious man; he somewhat stormily prided himself on the contrary; but he notes at this time "a dream which Arabella had of Her, in which she prophesied their meeting in five years," that is, of course, the meeting of Elizabeth and Arabella. His friend Milsand, to whom Sordello was dedicated, died in 1886.
One morning M. Milsand came to them in anxious haste, and insisted on their starting that very day. An order, he said, had been issued that no native should leave the country, and it only needed some unusually thick-headed Maire for Mr. Browning to be arrested as a runaway Frenchman or a Prussian spy.
Browning's side; for M. Milsand united the qualities of a critical intellect with a tenderness, a loyalty, and a simplicity of nature seldom found in combination with them. * He published also an admirable little work on the requirements of secondary education in France, equally applicable in many respects to any country and to any time.
In a note written twenty-three years later to his friend Milsand, and prefixed as a dedication to 'Sordello' in his collected works, he defined the form and its reason most exactly: "The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires, and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study."
Fanny Kemble Summer in London Tennyson Ruskin. It was during this winter in Paris that Mr. Browning became acquainted with M. Joseph Milsand, the second Frenchman with whom he was to be united by ties of deep friendship and affection.
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