Popularity came late to Robert Browning, but in his last years he could walk the streets of London and see shop windows full of posters and bookmarks and needlework cases inscribed with some of his cheeriest lines: "God's in his heaven -- All's right with the world!" and "O to be in England/Now that April's there" and "A man's reach should exceed his grasp/Or what's a heaven for?"
Browning gave every indication of enjoying the commerce of fame, and took every opportunity to jeer at those critics and naysayers who, in his view, had forestalled it. Most of his career had been spent in a double shadow -- that of the Poet Laureate, Lord Tennyson, and that of his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning ... FULL STORY »
