Aldworth, August, 1889.
My Dear Browning,—I thank you with my whole heart and being for your noble and affectionate letter, and with my whole heart and being I return your friendship. To be loved and appreciated by so great and powerful a nature as yours will be a solace to me, and lighten my dark hours during the short time of life that is left to us.
Ever Yours,
A. Tennyson.
The poet found himself again longing for his Italy. To Mrs. Bronson, under date of August 8, he wrote, referring to a letter of hers received two days before, crowned with “the magical stamp of Asolo”:
“... So a fancy springs up which shall have utterance as just a fancy. The time has come for determining on some change of place, if change is ever to be, and, I repeat, just a fancy, if I were inclined to join you at Asolo, say a fortnight hence, could good rooms be procurable for Sarianna and myself? Now as you value—I won’t say my love, but my respect and esteem—understand me literally, and give me only the precise information I want—not one half-syllable about accommodation in your house!
“I ask because when I and Sarianna went there years ago, the old Locanda on the Square lay in ruins, and we put up at a rougher inn in the town’s self. I dare say the principal hotel is rebuilt by this time, or rather has grown somewhat old. Probably you are there indeed. Just tell us exactly. Pen is trying his best to entice us his way, which means to Primiero and Venice; but the laziness of age is subduing me, and how I shrink from the ‘middle passage,’—all that day and night whirling from London to Basle, with the eleven or twelve hours to Milan. Milan opens on Paradise, but the getting to Milan! Perhaps I shall turn northward and go to Scotland after all. Still, dear and good one, tell me what I ask. After the requisite information you will please tell me accurately how you are, how that wicked gad-a-bout, Edith, is, and where; and what else you can generously afford of news,—news Venetian, I mean....”
Later the poet writes:
“... I trust that as few clouds as may be may trouble the blue of our month at Asolo; I shall bring your book full of verses for a final overhauling on the spot where, when I first saw it, inspiration seemed to steam up from the very ground.
“And so Edith is (I conjecture, I hope, rightly) to be with you; won’t I show her the little ridge in the ruin where one talks to the echo to greatest advantage.”
From Milan Browning wrote to Mrs. Bronson:
Dearest Friend,—It is indeed a delight to expect a meeting so soon. Be good and mindful of how simple our tastes and wants are, and how they have been far more than satisfied by the half of what you provided to content them. I shall have nothing to do but to enjoy your company, not even the little business of improving my health since that seems perfect. I hear you do not walk as in the old days. I count upon setting that right again. O Venezia, benedetta!
It was with greater enjoyment, apparently, than ever before even, that Mr. Browning turned to the Asolo of his “Pippa Passes” and “Sordello.” Mrs. Bronson, in her brilliant and sympathetic picturing of the poet, speaks of his project “to raise a tower like Pippa’s near a certain property in Asolo, where he and Miss Browning might pass at least a part of every year.” The “certain property,” to which Mrs. Bronson so modestly alludes, was her own place, “La Mura.” The tower has since been erected by the poet’s son, and the dream is thus fulfilled, though the elder Browning did not live to see it. Mrs. Bronson describes his enjoyment of nature in this lovely little hill-town,—“the ever-changing cloud shadows on the plain, the ranges of many-tinted mountains in the distance, and the fairy-like outline of the blue Euganean Hills, which form in part the southern boundary of the vast Campagna.” Browning would speak of the associations which these hills bear with the names of Shelley and Byron.
Across the deep ravine from La Mura a ruined tower was all that remained of the villa of Queen Catarina Cornaro, who, when she lost Cyprus, retired to Asolo; and in Browning’s dedication to Mrs. Bronson of his “Asolando,” he ascribes the title to Cardinal Bembo, the secretary of Queen Catarina. Mr. Browning loved to recall the traditions of that poetic little court, which for two decades was held within those walls, whose decay was fairly hidden by the wealth of flowers that embowered them. Of his own project he would talk, declaring that he would call it “Pippa’s Tower,” and that it should be so built that from it he could see Venice every day. He playfully described the flag-signals that should aid communication between “Pippa’s Tower” and Casa Alvisi. “A telephone is too modern,” he said; and explained that when he asked his friend to dine the flag should be blue,—her favorite color; and if her answer was yes, her flag should be the same color; or if no, her flag should be red. This last visit of the poet to his city of dream and vision seemed to Mrs. Bronson one of unalloyed pleasure. “To think that I should be here again!” he more than once exclaimed, as if with an unconscious recognition that these weeks were to complete the cycle of his life on earth. Asolo is thirty-four miles from Venice, and it is within easy driving distance of Possagno, the native place of Canova, in whose memory the town has a museum filled with his works and casts. “Pen must see this,” remarked Mr. Browning, as he lingered over the statues and groups and tombs. Mrs. Bronson records that one day on returning from a drive to Bassano the poet was strangely silent, and no one spoke; finally he announced that he had written a poem since they left Bassano. In response to an exclamation of surprise he said: “Oh, it’s all in my head, but I shall write it out presently.” His hostess asked if he would not even say what inspired it, to which he returned:
“Well, the birds twittering in the trees suggested it. You know I don’t like women to wear those things in their bonnets.” The poem in question proved to be “The Lady and the Painter.”
Mr. Browning took the greatest enjoyment in the view from Mrs. Bronson’s loggia. “Here,” he would say, “we can enjoy beauty without fatigue, and be protected from sun, wind, and rain.” His hostess has related that its charm made him often break his abstemious habit of refusing the usual five o’clock refreshment, and that he “loved to hear the hissing urn,” and when occasionally accepting a cup of tea and a biscuit would say, “I think I am the better for this delicious tea, after all.”
Every afternoon at three they all went to drive, exploring the region in all directions. The driving in Asolo seemed to charm him as did the gondola excursions in Venice. “He observed everything,” said Mrs. Bronson, “hedges, trees, the fascination of the little river Musone, the great carri piled high with white and purple grapes. He removed his hat in returning the salutation of a priest, and touched his hat in returning the salutation of the poorest peasant, who, after the manner of the country, lifted his own to greet the passing stranger. ‘I always salute the church,’ Mr. Browning would say; ‘I respect it.’”
All his life Browning was an early riser. In Asolo, as elsewhere, he began his day with a cold bath at seven, and at eight he and his sister sat down to their simple breakfast, their hostess keeping no such heroic hours. Mrs. Bronson had adopted the foreign fashion of having her light breakfast served in her room, and her mornings were given to her wide correspondence and her own reading and study. She was a most accomplished and scholarly woman, whose goodness of heart and charm of manner were paralleled by her range of intellectual interests and her grasp of affairs.
After breakfasting Browning and his sister, inseparable companions always, would start off on their wanderings over the hills. The poet was keenly interested in searching out the points of interest of his early years in Asolo; the “echo,” the remembered views, the vista whose fascination still remained for him. From the ruined rocca that crowned the hill, the view comprised all the violet-hued plain, stretching away to Padua, Vicenzo, Bassano; the entire atmosphere filled with historic and poetic associations. How the poet mirrored the panorama in his stanzas:
“How many a year, my Asolo,
Since—one step just from sea to land—
I found you, loved yet feared you so—
For natural objects seemed to stand
Palpably fire-clothed! No—”
The “lambent flame,” and “Italia’s rare, o’er-running beauty,” enchanted his vision.
Returning from their saunterings, the brother and sister took up their morning reading of English and French newspapers, Italian books, with the poet’s interludes always of his beloved Greek dramatists.
In these October days the Storys arrived to visit Mrs. Bronson in her picturesque abode. An ancient wall, mostly in ruins, with eighteen towers, still surrounds Asolo, and partly in one of these towers, and partly in the arch of the old portal, “La Mura” was half discovered and half constructed. Its loggia had one wall composed entirely of sliding glass, which could be a shelter from the storm with no obstruction of the view, or be thrown open to all the bloom and beauty of the radiant summer. Just across the street was the apartment in which Mrs. Bronson bestowed her guests.
That Browning and Story should thus be brought together again for their last meeting on earth, however undreamed of to them, prefigures itself now as another of those mosaic-like events that combined in beauty and loveliness to make all his last months on earth a poetic sequence. The Storys afterward spoke of Mr. Browning as being “well, and in such force, brilliant, and delightful as ever”; and the last words that passed between the poet and the sculptor were these of Browning’s: “We have been friends for forty years, forty years without a break!”
On the first day of November this perfect and final visit to Asolo ended, and yielding to the entreaties of his son, Browning and his sister bade farewell to Mrs. Bronson and her daughter, who were soon to follow them to Venice, where the poet and Miss Browning were to be the guests of the Barrett Brownings in Palazzo Rezzonico.
The events of all these weeks seem divinely appointed to complete with stately symmetry this noble life. As one of them he found in Venice his old friend, and (as has before been said) the greatest interpreter of his poetry, Dr. Hiram Corson. The Cornell professor was taking his University Sabbatical year, and with Mrs. Corson had arrived in Venice just before the poet came down from Asolo. “I called on him the next day,” Dr. Corson said of this meeting. “He seemed in his usual vigor, and expressed great pleasure in the restorations his son was making in the palace. ‘It’s a grand edifice,’ he said, ‘but too vast.’”
Dr. Corson continued:
“He was then engaged in reading the proofs of his ‘Asolando.’ He usually walked two hours every day; went frequently in his gondola with his sister to his beloved Lido, and one day when I walked with him
‘Where St. Mark’s is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings,’
I had to quicken my steps to keep pace with him. He called my attention to an interesting feature of this world-renowned place, and told me much of their strange history. He knew the city literally par cœur.”
Professor Hiram Corson
From a painting by J. Colin Forbes, R.A., in the possession of Eugene Rollin Corson.
Mr. Browning passed with Dr. and Mrs. Corson the last morning they were in Venice. Of the parting Dr. Corson has since written in a personal letter to a friend:
“He told us much about himself; about Asolo, which he had first visited more than fifty years before, during his visit to Italy in 1838, when, as he says in the Prologue to ‘Asolando,’ alluding to ‘the burning bush,’
‘Natural objects seemed to stand
Palpably fire-clothed.’
“A servant announcing that the gondola had come to take us to the railway station, he rose from his chair, and said, ‘Now be sure to visit me next May, in London. You’ll remember where my little house is in De Vere Gardens’; and bidding us a cordial good-bye, with a ‘God bless you both,’ he hastened away. We little thought, full of life as he then was, that we should see him no more in this world.”
To a letter from Miss Browning to their hostess, Browning added:
Dearest Mrs. Bronson,—I am away from you in one sense, never to be away from the thought of you, and your inexpressible kindness. I trust you will see your way to returning soon. Venice is not herself without you, in my eyes—I dare say this is a customary phrase, but you well know what reason I have to use it, with a freshness as if it were inspired for the first time. Come, bringing news of Edith, and the doings in the house, and above all of your own health and spirits and so rejoice
Ever your affectionate
Robert Browning.
With another letter of his sister’s to their beloved friend and hostess, Mr. Browning sent the following note,—perhaps the last lines that he ever wrote to Mrs. Bronson, as she returned almost immediately to Casa Alvisi, and the daily personal intercourse renewed itself to be broken only by his illness and death. The poet wrote:
Palazzo Rezzonico, Nov. 5th, 1889.
Dearest Friend,—A word to slip into the letter of Sarianna, which I cannot see go without a scrap of mine. (Come and see Pen and you will easily concert things with him.) I have all confidence in his knowledge and power.
I delight in hearing how comfortably all is proceeding with you at La Mura. I want to say that having finished the first two volumes of Gozzi, I brought the third with me to finish at my leisure and return to you; and particularly I may mention that the edition is very rare and valuable. It appears that Symmonds has just thought it worth while to translate the work, and he was six months finding a copy to translate from!
... I have got—since three or four days—the whole of my new volume in type, and expect to send it back, corrected, by to-morrow at latest. But I must continue at my work lest interruptions occur, so, bless you and good-bye in the truest sense, dear one!
Ever Your Affectionately
Robert Browning.
The “new volume in type” to which he referred was his collection entitled “Asolando,” all of which, with the exception of one poem, had been written within the last two years of his life.
Mr. Barrett Browning relates that while his father was reading aloud these last proofs to himself and his wife, the poet paused over the “Epilogue,” at the stanza—
“One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.”
and remarked: “It almost seems like praising myself to say this, and yet it is true, the simple truth, and so I shall not cancel it.”
November, often lovely in Venice, was singularly summer-like that year. On one day Mr. Browning found the heat on the Lido “scarcely endurable,” indeed, but “snow-tipped Alps” revealed themselves in the distance, offering a strange contrast to the brilliant sunshine and the soft blue skies. Still November is not June, after all, however perfect the imitation of some of its days. One day there was a heavy fog on his favorite Lido, and the poet, who refused to be deprived of his walk, became thoroughly chilled and illness followed. The following note from Mr. Barrett Browning to Mrs. Bronson indicates the anxiety that prevailed in Palazzo Rezzonico, where the tenderest care of his son and daughter-in-law ministered to the poet. The note is undated, save by the day of the week.
Palazzo Rezzonico,
9 o’clock, Monday Evening.
Dearest Mrs. Bronson,—The improvement of last night is scarcely maintained this morning,—the action of the heart being weaker at moments. He is quite clear-headed, and is never tired of saving he feels better, “immensely better,—I don’t suppose I could get up and walk about, in fact I know I could not, but I have no aches or pains,—quite comfortable, could not be more so,”—this is what he said a moment ago.
I will let you know if there is any change as the day goes on.
My love to you.
Yours, Pen.
The delightful relations that had always prevailed between the poet and his publishers were touchingly completed when, just before he breathed his last, came a telegram from George Murray Smith with its tidings of the interest with which “Asolando” was being received in England. And then this little note written on that memorable date of December 12, 1889, from Barrett Browning to Mrs. Bronson, tells the story of the poet’s entrance on the new life.
Dearest Friend,—Our Beloved breathed his last as San Marco’s clock struck ten,—without pain—unconsciously.
I was able to make him happy a little before he became unconscious by a telegram from Smith saying, “Reviews in all this day’s papers most favorable, edition nearly exhausted.”
He just murmured, “How gratifying.”
Those were his last intelligible words.
Yours, Pen.
In that hour how could the son and the daughter who so loved him remember aught save the exquisite lines with which the poet had anticipated the reunion with his “Lyric Love”:
“Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!”
In the grand sala with its floor of black Italian marble and its lofty ceiling with exquisite fresco decoration, the simple and impressive service was held in Palazzo Rezzonico, and a fleet of gondolas, filled with friends and accompanied by the entire Venetian Syndic, bore the casket to its temporary resting-place in the chapel of San Michele, in the campo santo. The gondola that carried the casket had an angel, carved in wood, at the prow, and a lion at the stern. Dean Bradley, on behalf of Westminster Abbey, had telegraphed to Robert Barrett Browning, asking that the body of the poet might be laid within those honored walls; and as the cemetery in Florence wherein is Mrs. Browning’s tomb had long been closed, this honor from England was accepted. The same honor of a final resting-place in Westminster Abbey was also extended for the removal of the body of Mrs. Browning, but their son rightly felt that he must yield to the wishes of Florence that her tomb be undisturbed, and it is fitting that it should remain in the Italy she so loved.
Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice
Owned by Robert Browning from 1888 to 1906. In the upper room, at the left-hand corner, the poet died.
So associated with her brother’s life was Miss Sarianna Browning that the story would be incomplete not to add that she survived him many years,—a gracious and beloved presence. In the January following the poet’s death, she said in a letter to Mrs. Bronson:
“I have already let a day pass without thanking you for the most beautiful locket, which I love even more for your sake than his. I shall always think of you, so good, so near, and so dearly loved by him. All your watchfulness over our smallest comfort,—how he felt it!... Bless you forever for all the joy you gave him at Asolo,—how happy he was! And how you were entwined in all our plans for the happy future we were to enjoy there! Think of him when you go back, as loving the whole place, and yourself, the embodiment of its sweetness.”
Miss Browning died in her nephew’s home, La Torre All’ Antella, near Florence, in the spring of 1903, in her ninetieth year.
On the façade of the Palazzo Rezzonico the City of Venice placed this inscription to the memory of the poet:
a
ROBERTO BROWNING
morto in questo palazzo
il 12 Dicembre, 1889
venezia
pose
“Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it,—‘Italy’”
It was on the last day of 1889 that the impressive rites were held in Westminster Abbey for Robert Browning. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dean of Windsor, an aid-de-camp representing Queen Victoria, Dean Bradley, the sub-dean, and many eminent canons, and Sir Frederick Bridge, of the Abbey choir, all were present among the officiating clergy. The casket under its purple pall, with a massive cross of violets, and wreaths of lilies-of-the valley, and white roses (Mrs. Browning’s favorite flower), was followed by the honorary pall-bearers including Hallam Tennyson, representing the Poet Laureate (whose health did not permit him to be present), Archdeacon Farrar, the Master of Balliol (representing Oxford), the Master of Trinity (representing Cambridge), Professor Masson (representing the University of Edinburgh), and George Murray Smith. The committal service was entirely choral, and Mrs. Browning’s poem with its touching refrain,
“He giveth His beloved sleep!”
was chanted by the full vested choir of the Abbey, to music composed for the occasion by Sir Frederick Bridge. Preceding the Benediction, the entire vast concourse of people united in singing the hymn,
“O God, our help in ages past!”
As that great assemblage turned away from the last rites in commemoration of the poet who produced the largest body of poetry, and the most valuable as a spiritual message, of any English poet, was there not wafted in the air the choral strains from some unseen angelic choir, that thrilled the venerable Abbey with celestial triumph:
“‘Glory to God—to God!’ he saith:
Knowledge by suffering entereth,
And Life is perfected by Death.”