21 A MARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY GIFT OF MRS. WALTER S. BARKER FEBRUARY 25, 1931 COPYRIGHT 1900 BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN and Co. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED EDITOR'S NOTE THE text followed in this edition is that of the latest comprehensive English edition, and as Mrs. Browning sought to give more than ordinary weight to certain words and phrases, her italicizing and capitalization have been followed. A few of her early and merely experimental essays in versification have been omitted from the Appendix, but it has been thought advisable to reprint there certain prose studies which disclose, quite as surely as the poetry written at the same time, the intellectual tastes of the writer, and give an interesting illustration of the development of her mind. In accordance with the general plan of the Cambridge editions, the headnotes to poems and groups of poems are restricted for the most part to biographical and bibliographical detail, but in the Notes and Illustrations in the Appendix, the editor of the volume has taken the opportunity to make some survey of those characteristics of Mrs. Browning's poetry and those qualities of her mind which especially distinguish her. For this she has had recourse in some particulars to the recently published Letters. Her own notes are marked by brackets. The explicatory notes of passages are mainly those contributed by Mrs. Browning herself to the successive volumes of her published work. H. E. S. |