Robert Browning

there will be found in him that he knew the worth of love, that he saw the horror of the void in which he lived, and that for a moment—though too late—a sudden wave of not ignoble passion overwhelmed his baser self, even if only to let the fangs of the treacherous rock reappear in their starkness and cruelty.

Her husband, good man, will not suffer acutely for her loss; he will be true to duty, and continue to dose his flock with the comfortable dogma of hell-fire, in which not one of them believes.

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^[117] 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. But vigour alone does not produce poetry, and it may easily run into a kind of good-humoured effrontery. The speciality of the volume as compared with its predecessors is that it contains not a little running comment by Browning upon himself and his own work, together with a jocular-savage reply to his unfriendly critics. There is a little too much in all this of the robustious Herakles sending his great voice before him. An author ought to be aware of the fact that no pledge to admire him and his writings has been administered to every one who enters the world, and that as sure as he attracts, so surely must he repel. In the Epilogue the poet informs his readers that those who expect from him, or from any poet, strong wine of verse which is also sweet demand the impossible. Sweet the strong wine can become only after it has long lain mellowing in the cask. The experience of Browning's readers contradicted the assertion. Some who drank the good wines of 1855 and of 1864 in the year of the vintages found that they were strong and needed no keeping to be sweet. Wine-tasters must make distinctions, and the quality of the yield of 1876 does not entitle it to be remembered as an extraordinary year.

The poem from which the volume was named tells in verse, "timed by raps of the knuckle," how the painter Pacchiarotto must needs become a world-reformer, or at least a city-reformer in his distressed Siena, with no good results for his city and with disastrous results for himself. He learns by unsavoury experience his lesson, to hold on by the paint-brush and maul-stick, and do his own work, accepting the mingled evil and good of life in a spirit of strenuous—not indolent—laissez-faire, playing, as energetically as a human being can, his own part, and leaving others to play theirs, assured that for all and each this life is the trial-time and test of eternity, the rehearsal for the performance in a future world, and "Things rarely go smooth at Rehearsal." Browning's joy in difficult rhyming as seen in this serio-grotesque jingle was great; some readers may be permitted to wish that many of his rhymes were not merely difficult but impossible. At a dinner given by Sir Leslie Stephen he met successfully the challenge to produce a rhyme for "rhinoceros," and for Tennyson's diversion he delivered himself of an impromptu in which rhymes were found for "Ecclefechan" and "Craigenputtock." But in rhyming ingenuity Browning is inferior to the author of "Hudibras," in a rhymer's elegant effrontery he is inferior to the author of "Don Juan." Browning's good-humoured effrontery in his rhymes expects too much good-humour from his reader, who may be amiable enough to accept rough and ready successes, but cannot often be delighted by brilliant gymnastics of sound and sense. In like manner it asks for a particularly well-disposed reader to appreciate the wit of Browning's retort upon his critics: "You are chimney-sweeps," he sings out in his great voice, "listen! I have invented several insulting nicknames for you. Decamp! or my housemaid will fling the slops in your faces." This may appear to some persons to be genial and clever. It certainly has none of the exquisite malignity of Pope's poisoned rapier. Perhaps it is a little dull; perhaps it is a little outrageous.

The Browning who masks as Shakespeare in At the Mermaid disclaims the ambition of heading a poetical faction, condemns the Byronic Welt-schmerz, and announces his resolvedly cheerful acceptance of life. Elsewhere he assures his readers that though his work is theirs his life is his own; he will not unlock his heart in sonnets. Such is the drift of the verses entitled House; a peep through the window is permitted, but "please you, no foot over threshold of mine." This was not Shakespeare's wiser way; if he hid himself behind his work, it was with the openness and with the taciturnity of Nature. He did not stand in the window of his "House" declaring that he was not to be seen; he did not pull up and draw down the blind to make it appear that he was at home and not at home. In the poem Shop Browning continues his assurances that he is no Eglamor to whom verse is "a temple-worship vague and vast." Verse-making is his trade as jewel-setting and jewel-selling is the goldsmith's—but do you suppose that the poet lives no life of his own?—how and where it is not for you to guess, only be certain it is far away from his counter and his till. These poems were needless confidences to the public that no confidences would be vouchsafed to them.

And the friend will value love all the more which persists through the obstacles of partial ignorance.^[118] The blank verse monologue A Forgiveness, Browning's "Spanish Tragedy," is a romance of passion, subtle in its psychology, tragic in its action. Out of its darkness gleams especially one resplendent passage—the description of those weapons of Eastern workmanship—

one of which is the instrument chosen by the husband's hatred, now replacing his contempt, to confer on his wife a death that is voluptuous. The grim-grotesque incident from the history of the Jews in Italy related in Filippo Baldinucci recalls the comedy and the pathos of Holy Cross Day, to which it is in every respect inferior. The Jew of the centuries of Christian persecution is for Browning's imagination a being half-sublime and half-grotesque, and wholly human. Cenciaja, a note in verse connected with Shelley's Cenci, would be excellent as a note in prose appended to the tragedy, explaining, as it does, why the Pope, inclining to pardon Beatrice, was turned aside from his purposes of mercy; it rather loses than gains in value by having been thrown into verse. To recover our loyalty to Browning as a poet, which this volume sometimes puts to the test, we might well reserve Numpholeptos for the close. The pure and disempassioned in womanly form is brought face to face with the passionate and sullied lover, to whom her charm is a tyranny; she is no warm sun but a white moon rising above this lost Endymion, who never slumbers but goes forth on hopeless quests at the bidding of his mistress, and wins for all his reward the "sad, slow, silver smile," which is now pity, now disdain, and never love. The subjugating power of chaste and beautiful superiority to passion over this mere mortal devotee is absolute and inexorable. Is the nymph an abstraction and incarnation of something that may be found in womanhood? Is she an embodiment of the Ideal, which sends out many questers, and pities and disdains them when they return soiled and defeated? Soft and sweet as she appears, she is La belle Dame sans merci, and her worshipper is as desperately lost as the knight-at-arms of Keats's poem.

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Chapter XV

The volume which consists of La Saisiaz and The Two Poets of Croisic (1878) brings the work of this decade to a close.^[119] La Saisiaz, the record of thoughts that were awakened during that solitary clamber to the summit of Salève after the death of Miss Egerton-Smith, is not an elegy, but it remains with us as a memorial of friendship. In reading it we discern the tall white figure of the "stranger lady," leaning through the terrace wreaths of leaf and bloom, or pacing that low grass-path which she had loved and called her own. It serves Browning's purpose in the poem that she should have been one of those persons who in this world have not manifested all that lies within them. Does she still exist, or is she now no more than the thing which lies in the little enclosure at Collonge? The poem after its solemn and impressive prelude becomes the record of an hour's debate of the writer with himself—a debate which has a definite aim and is brought to a definite issue. In conducting that debate on immortality, Browning is neither Christian nor anti-Christian. The Christian creed involves a question of history; he cannot here admit historical considerations; he will see the matter out as he is an individual soul, on the grounds suggested by his individual consciousness and his personal knowledge. It may be that any result he arrives at is a result for himself alone.

The idea of a future life, for which this earthly life serves as an education and a test, is so central with Browning, so largely influences all his feelings and penetrates all his art, that it is worth while to attend to the course of his argument and the nature of his conclusion. He puts the naked question to himself—What does death mean? Is it total extinction? Is it a passage into life?—without any vagueness, without any flattering metaphor; he is prepared to accept or endure any answer if only it be the truth. Whether his discussion leads to a trustworthy result or not, the sincerity and the energy of his endeavour after truth serve to banish all supine and half-hearted moods. The debate, of which his poem is a report, falls into two parts: first, a statement of facts; secondly, a series of conjectures—conjectures and no more—rising from the basis of facts that are ascertained. To put the question, "Shall I survive death?" is to assume that I exist and that something other than myself exists which causes me now to live and presently to die. The nature of this power outside myself I do not know; we may for convenience call it "God." Beyond these two facts—myself and a power environing me—nothing is known with certainty which has any bearing on the matter in dispute. I am like a floating rush borne onward by a stream; whither borne the rush cannot tell; but rush and stream are facts that cannot be questioned.

If this failure be ordained by necessity, I shall bear it as best I can; but, if this life be all, nothing shall force me to say that life has proceeded from a cause supreme in goodness, wisdom, and power. What I find here is goodness always intermixed with evil; wisdom which means an advance from error to the confession of ignorance; power that is insufficient to adapt a human being to his surroundings even in the degree in which a worm is fitted to the leaf on which it feeds.

Thus out of defeat springs victory; never are we so near to knowledge as when we are checked at the bounds of ignorance; beauty is felt through its opposite; good is known through evil; truth shows its potency when it is confronted by falsehood;

Such is the conclusion with Browning of the whole matter. It is in entire accordance with a letter which he wrote two years previously to a lady who supposed herself to be dying, and who had thanked him for help derived from his poems: "All the help I can offer, in my poor degree, is the assurance that I see ever more reason to hold by the same hope—and that by no means in ignorance of what has been advanced to the contrary.... God bless you, sustain you, and receive you." To Dr Moncure Conway, who had lost a son, Browning wrote: "If I, who cannot, would restore your son, He who can, will." And Mr Rudolph Lehmann records his words in conversation: "I have doubted and denied it [a future life], and I fear have even printed my doubts; but now I am as deeply convinced that there is something after death. If you ask me what, I no more know it than my dog knows who and what I am. He knows that I am there and that is enough for him."^[120]

Browning's confession in La Saisias that the sorrow of his life outweighed its joy is not inconsistent with his habitual cheerfulness of manner. Such estimates as this are little to be trusted. One great shock of pain may stand for ever aloof from all other experiences; the pleasant sensations of many days pass from our memory. We cannot tell. But that Browning supposed himself able to tell is in itself worthy of note. In The Two Poets of Croisic, which was written in London immediately after La Saisiaz, and which, though of little intrinsic importance, shows that Browning was capable of a certain grace in verse that is light, he pleads that the power of victoriously dealing with pain and transforming it into strength may be taken as the test of a poet's greatness:

This is good counsel for art; but not wholly wise counsel for life. Sorrow, indeed, is not wronged by a cheerfulness cultivated and strenuously maintained; but gladness does suffer a certain wrong. Sunshine comes and goes; the attempt to substitute any unrelieved light for sunshine is somewhat of a failure at the best. Shadows and brightness pursuing each other according to the course of nature make more for genuine happiness than does any stream of moral electricity worked from a dynamo of the will. It is pleasanter to encounter a breeze that sinks and swells, that lingers and hastens, than to face a vigorous and sustained gale even of a tonic quality. Browning's unfailing cheer and cordiality of manner were admirable; they were in part spontaneous, in part an acceptance of duty, in part a mode of self-protection; they were only less excellent than the varying moods of a simple and beautiful nature.

When La Saisiaz appeared Browning was sixty-six years old. He lived for more than eleven years longer, during which period he published six volumes of verse, showing new powers as a writer of brief poetic narrative and as a teacher through parables; but he produced no single work of prolonged and sustained effort—which perhaps was well. His physical vigour continued for long unabated. He still enjoyed the various pleasures and excitements of the London season; but it is noted by Mrs Orr that after the death of Miss Egerton-Smith he "almost mechanically renounced all the musical entertainments to which she had so regularly accompanied him." His daily habits were of the utmost regularity, varying hardly at all from week to week. He was averse, says Mrs Orr, "to every hought of change," and chose rather to adapt himself to external conditions than to enter on the effort of altering them; "what he had done once he was wont, for that very reason, to continue doing." A few days after Browning's death a journalist obtained from a photographer, Mr Grove, who had formerly been for seven years in Browning's service, the particulars as to how an ordinary day during the London season went by at Warwick Crescent. Browning rose without fail at seven, enjoyed a plate of whatever fruit—strawberries, grapes, oranges—were in season; read, generally some piece of foreign literature, for an hour in his bedroom; then bathed; breakfasted—a light meal of twenty minutes; sat by the fire and read his Times and Daily News till ten; from ten to one wrote in his study or meditated with head resting on his hand. To write a letter was the reverse of a pleasure to him, yet he was diligent in replying to a multitude of correspondents. His lunch, at one, was of the lightest kind, usually no more than a pudding. Visits, private views of picture exhibitions and the like followed until half-past five. At seven he dined, preferring Carlowitz or claret to other wines, and drinking little of any. But on many days the dinner was not at home; once during three successive weeks he dined out without the omission of a day. He returned home seldom at a later hour than half-past twelve; and at seven next morning the round began again. During his elder years, says Mr Grove, he took little interest in politics. He was not often a church-goer, but discussed religious matters earnestly with his clerical friends. He loved not only animals but flowers, and when once a Virginia creeper entered the study window at Warwick Crescent, it was not expelled but trained inside the room. To his servants he was a considerate friend rather than a master.

Many persons have attempted to describe Browning as he appeared in society; there is a consensus of opinion as to the energy and cordiality of his way of social converse; but it is singular that, though some records of his out-pourings as a talker exist, very little is on record that possesses permanent value. Perhaps the best word that can be quoted is that remembered by Sir James Paget—Browning's recommendation of Bach's "Crucifixus—et sepultus—et resurrexit" as a cure for want of belief. He did not fling such pointed shafts as those of Johnson which still hang and almost quiver where they struck. His energy did not gather itself up into sentences but flowed—and sometimes foamed—in a tide. Cordial as he was, he could be also vehemently intolerant, and sometimes perhaps where his acquaintance with the subject of his discourse was not sufficient to warrant a decided opinion.^[121] He appeared, says his biographer, "more widely sympathetic in his works than in his life"; with no moral selfishness he was, adds Mrs Orr, intellectually self-centred; and unquestionably the statement is correct. He could suffer fools, but not always gladly. Speaking of earlier days in Italy, T.A. Trollope observes that, while he was never rough or discourteous even to the most exasperating fool, "the men used to be rather afraid of Browning." His cordiality was not insincere; but it belonged to his outer, not his inner self. With the exception of Milsand, he appears to have admitted no man to his heart, though he gave a portion of his intellect to many. His friends, in the more intimate sense of the word, were women, towards whom his feeling was that of comradeship and fraternal affection without over-much condescension or any specially chivalric sentiment. When early in their acquaintance Miss Barrett promised Browning that he would find her "an honest man on the whole," she understood her correspondent, who valued a good comrade of the other sex, and had at the same time a vivid sense of the fact that such a comrade was not so unfortunate as to be really a man.

Let witnesses be cited and each give his fragment of evidence. Mr W.J. Stillman, an excellent observer, was specially impressed in his intercourse with Browning, by the mental health and robustness of a nature sound to the core; "an almost unlimited intellectual vitality, and an individuality which nothing could infringe on, but which a singular sensitiveness towards others prevented from ever wounding even the most morbid sensibility; a strong man armed in the completest defensive armour, but with no aggressiveness."^[122] A writer in the first volume of The New Review, described Browning as a talker in general society so faithfully that it is impossible to improve on what he has said: "It may safely be alleged," he writes, "that no one meeting Mr Browning for the first time, and unfurnished with a clue, would guess his vocation. He might be a diplomatist, a statesman, a discoverer, or a man of science. But, whatever were his calling, we should feel that it must be essentially practical.... His conversation corresponds to his appearance. It abounds in vigour, in fire, in vivacity. Yet all the time it is entirely free from mystery, vagueness, or technical jargon. It is the crisp, emphatic and powerful discourse of a man of the world, who is incomparably better informed than the mass of his congeners. Mr Browning is the readiest, the blithest, and the most forcible of talkers. Like the Monsignore in Lothair he can 'sparkle with anecdote and blaze with repartee,' and when he deals in criticism the edge of his sword is mercilessly whetted against pretension and vanity. The inflection of his voice, the flash of his eye, the pose of his head, the action of his hand, all lend their special emphasis to the condemnation." The mental quality which most impressed Mr W.M. Rossetti in his communications with Browning was, he says, "celerity "—"whatever he had to consider or speak about, he disposed of in the most forthright style." His method was of the greatest directness; "every touch told, every nail was hit on the head." He was not a sustained, continuous speaker, nor exactly a brilliant one; "but he said something pleasant and pointed on whatever turned up; ... one felt his mind to be extraordinarily rich, while his facility, accessibility, and bonhomie, softened but did not by any means disguise the sense of his power."^[123] Browning's discourse with a single person who was a favoured acquaintance was, Mr Gosse declares, "a very much finer phenomenon than when a group surrounded him." Then "his talk assumed the volume and the tumult of a cascade. His voice rose to a shout, sank to a whisper, ran up and down the gamut of conversational melody.... In his own study or drawing-room, what he loved was to capture the visitor in a low arm-chair's "sofa-lap of leather", and from a most unfair vantage of height to tyrannize, to walk round the victim, in front, behind, on this side, on that, weaving magic circles, now with gesticulating arms thrown high, now grovelling on the floor to find some reference in a folio, talking all the while, a redundant turmoil of thoughts, fancies, and reminiscences flowing from those generous lips."^[124]

Mr Henry James in his "Life of Story"^[125] is less pictorial, but he is characteristically subtle in his rendering of the facts. He brings us back, however, to Browning as seen in society. He speaks of the Italian as a comparatively idyllic period which seemed to be "built out," though this was not really the case, by the brilliant London period. It was, he says, as if Browning had divided his personal consciousness into two independent compartments. The man of the world "walked abroad, showed himself, talked, right resonantly, abounded, multiplied his connections, did his duty." The poet—an inscrutable personage—"sat at home and knew, as well he might, in what quarters of that sphere to look for suitable company." "The poet and the 'member of society' were, in a word, dissociated in him as they can rarely elsewhere have been.... The wall that built out the idyll (as we call it for convenience) of which memory and imagination were virtually composed for him, stood there behind him solidly enough, but subject to his privilege of living almost equally on both sides of it. It contained an invisible door, through which, working the lock at will, he could softly pass, and of which he kept the golden key—carrying about the same with him even in the pocket of his dinner waistcoat, yet even in his most splendid expansions showing it, happy man, to none." Tennyson, said an acquaintance of Miss Anna Swanwick, "hides himself behind his laurels, Browning behind the man of the world." She declares that her experience was more fortunate; that she seldom heard Browning speak without feeling that she was listening to the poet, and that on more than one occasion he spoke to her of his wife^[126]. But many witnesses confirm the impression which is so happily put into words by Mr Henry James. The "member of society" protected the privacy of the poet. The questions remain whether the poet did not suffer from such protection; whether, beside the superfluous forces which might be advantageously disposed of at the drawing-board or in thumping wet clay, some of the forces proper to the poet were not drawn away and dissipated by the incessant demands of Society; whether while a sufficient fund of energy for the double life was present with Browning, the peculiar energy of the poet did not undergo a certain deterioration. The doctrine of the superiority of the heart to the intellect is more and more preached in Browning's poetry; but the doctrine itself is an act of the intellect. The poet need not perhaps insist on the doctrine if he creates—as Browning did in earlier years—beautiful things which commend themselves, without a preacher, to our love.

In the autumn of 1878, after seventeen years of absence from Italy, Browning was recaptured by its charm, and henceforward to the close of his life Venice and the Venetian district became his accustomed place of summer refreshment and repose. For a time, with his sister as his companion, he paused at a hotel near the summit of the Splügen, enjoyed the mountain air, walked vigorously, and wrote, with great rapidity, says Mrs Orr, his poem of Russia, Ivàn Ivànovitch. When a boy he had read in Bunyan's "Life and Death of Mr Badman" the story of "Old Tod", and with this still vivid in his memory, he added to his Russian tale the highly unidyllic "idyl" of English life, Ned Bratts. It was thus that subjects for poems suddenly presented themselves to Browning, often rising up as it were spontaneously out of the remote past. "There comes up unexpectedly," he wrote in a letter to a friend, "some subject for poetry, which has been dormant, and apparently dead, for perhaps dozens of years. A month since I wrote a poem of some two hundred lines ['Donald'] about a story I heard more than forty years ago, and never dreamed of trying to repeat, wondering how it had so long escaped me; and so it has been with my best things."^[127] Before the close of September the travellers were in a rough but pleasant albergo at Asolo, which Browning had not seen since his first Italian journey more than forty years previously. "Such things," he writes, "have begun and ended with me in the interval!" Changes had taken place in the little city; yet much seemed familiar and therefore the more dreamlike. The place had indeed haunted him in his dreams; he would find himself travelling with a friend, or some mysterious stranger, when suddenly the little town sparkling in the sunshine would rise before him. "Look! look there is Asolo," he would cry, "do let us go there!" And always, after the way of dreams, his companions would declare it impossible and he would be hurried away.^[128] From the time that he actually saw again the city that he loved this recurring dream was to come no more. He wandered through the well-known places, and seeking for an echo in the Rocca, the ruined fortress above the town, he found that it had not lost its tongue. A fortnight at Venice in a hotel where quiet and coolness were the chief attractions, prepared the way for many subsequent visits to what he afterwards called "the dearest place in the world." Everything in Venice, says Mrs Bronson, charmed him: "He found grace and beauty in the popolo whom he paints so well in the Goldoni sonnet. The poorest street children were pretty in his eyes. He would admire a carpenter or a painter, who chanced to be at work in the house, and say to me 'See the fine poise of the head ... those well-cut features. You might fancy that man in the crimson robe of a Senator as you see them in Tintoret's canvas.'"

But these are reminiscences of later days. It was in 1880 that Browning made the acquaintance of his American friend Mrs Arthur Bronson, whose kind hospitalities added to the happiness of his visits to Asolo and to Venice, who received, as if it were a farewell gift, the dedication of his last volume, and who, not long before her death in 1901, published interesting articles on "Browning in Asolo" and "Browning in Venice" in The Century Magazine. The only years in which he did not revisit Venice were 1882, 1884 and 1886, and in each of these years his absence was occasioned by some unforeseen mis-adventure. In 1882 the floods were out, and he proceeded no farther than Verona. Could he have overcome the obstacles and reached Venice, he feared that he might have been incapable of enjoying it. For the first time in his life he was lamed by what he took for an attack of rheumatism, "caught," he says, "just before leaving St Pierre de Chartreuse, through my stupid inadvertence in sitting with a window open at my back—reading the Iliad, all my excuse!—while clad in a thin summer suit, and snow on the hills and bitterness every where."^[129] In 1884 his sister's illness at first forbade travel to so considerable a distance. The two companions were received by another American friend, Mrs Bloomfield Moore, at the Villa Berry, St Moritz, and when she was summoned across the Atlantic, at her request they continued to occupy her villa. The season was past; the place deserted; but the sun shone gloriously. "We have walked every day," Browning wrote at the end of September, "morning and evening—afternoon I should say—two or three hours each excursion, the delicious mountain air surpassing any I was ever privileged to breathe. My sister is absolutely herself again, and something over: I was hardly in want of such doctoring."^[130] Two years later Miss Browning was ailing again, and they did not venture farther than Wales. At the Hand Hotel, Llangollen, they were at no great distance from Brintysilio, the summer residence of their friends Sir Theodore and Lady Martin—in earlier days the Lady Carlisle and Colombe of Browning's plays.^[131] Mrs Orr notices that Browning, Liberal as he declared himself, was now very favourably impressed by the services to society of the English country gentleman. "Talk of abolishing that class of men!" he exclaimed, "they are the salt of the earth!" She adds, as worthy of remark, that he attended regularly the afternoon Sunday service in the parish church at Llantysilio, where now a tablet of Lady Martin's placing marks the spot. Churchgoing was not his practice in London; "but I do not think," says Mrs Orr, "he ever failed in it at the Universities or in the country." At Venice it was his custom to be present with his sister at the services of a Waldensian chapel, where "a certain eloquent pastor," as Mrs Bronson describes him, was the preacher. A year before his death Browning in a letter to Lady Martin recalls the happy season in the Vale of Llangollen—"delightful weeks—each tipped with a sweet starry Sunday at the little church leading to the House Beautiful where we took our rest of an evening spent always memorably."

Before passing on to Venice, where repose was mingled with excitement, Browning was accustomed to seek a renewal of physical energy, after the fatigues of London, in some place not too much haunted by the English tourist, where he could walk for hours in the clear mountain air. In 1881 and 1882 it was St Pierre de Chartreuse, from which he visited the Grande Chartreuse, and heard the midnight mass; in 1883 and 1885 it was Gressoney St Jean in the Val d'Aosta—the "delightful Gressoney" of the Prologue to Ferishtah's Fancies, where "eggs, milk, cheese, fruit" sufficed "for gormandizing"; in 1888 it was the yet more beautiful Primiero, near Feltre. In the previous year he had, for the second time, stayed at St Moritz. These were seasons of abounding life. St Pierre was only "a wild little clump of cottages on a mountain amid loftier mountains," with the roughest of little inns for its hotel; but its primitive arrangements suited Browning well and were bravely borne by his sister.^[132] From Gressoney in September 1885 he wrote: "We are all but alone, the brief 'season' being over, and only a chance traveller turning up for a fortnight's lodging. We take our walks in the old way; two and a half hours before breakfast, three after it, in the most beautiful country I know. Yesterday the three hours passed without our meeting a single man, woman, or child; one man only was discovered at a distance at the foot of a mountain we had climbed."^[133] All things pleased him; an August snowstorm at St Moritz was made amends for by "the magnificence of the mountain and its firs black against the universal white"; it served moreover as an illustration of a passage in the Iliad, the only book that accompanied him from England: "The days glide away uneventfully, nearly, and I breathe in the pleasant idleness at every pore. I have no few acquaintances here—nay, some old friends—but my intimates are the firs on the hillside, and the myriad butterflies all about it, every bright wing of them under the snow to-day, which ought not to have been for a fortnight yet."^[134] And from Primiero in 1888, when his strength had considerably declined, a letter tells of unabated pleasure; of mountains "which morning and evening, in turn, transmute literally to gold," with at times a silver change; of the valley "one green luxuriance"; of the tiger-lilies in the garden above ten feet high, every bloom and every leaf faultless; and of the captive fox, "most engaging of little vixens," who, to Browning's great joy, broke her chain and escaped.^[135] As each successive volume that he published seemed to him his best, so of his mountain places of abode the last always was the loveliest.

At Venice for a time the quiet Albergo dell' Universo suited Browning and his sister well, but when Mrs Bronson pressed them to accept the use of a suite of rooms in the Palazzo Giustiniani Recanati and the kind offer was accepted, the gain was considerable; and the Palazzo has historical associations dating from the fifteenth century which pleased Browning's imagination. It was his habit to rise early, and after a light breakfast to visit the Public Gardens with his sister. He had many friends—Mrs Bronson is our informant—whose wants or wishes he bore in mind—the prisoned elephant, the baboon, the kangaroo, the marmosets, the pelicans, the ostrich; three times, with strict punctuality, he made his rounds, and then returned to his apartment. At noon appeared the second and more substantial breakfast, at which Italian dishes were preferred. Browning wrote passionately against the vivisection of animals, and strenuously declaimed against the decoration of a lady's hat with the spoils of birds—