In the winter which followed his change of abode from Warwick Crescent to the more commodious house in De Vere Gardens, the winter of 1887-1888, Browning's health and strength visibly declined; a succession of exhausting colds lowered his vitality; yet he maintained his habitual ways of life, and would not yield. In August 1888 he started ill for his Italian holiday, and travelled with difficulty and distress. But the rest among the mountains at Primiero restored him. At Venice he seemed as vigorous as he was joyous. And when he returned to London in February 1889 the improvement in his strength was in a considerable measure maintained. Yet it was evident that the physical vigour which had seemed invincible was on the ebb. In the early summer he paid the last of those visits, which he so highly valued, to Balliol College, Oxford. The opening week of June found him at Cambridge. Mr Gosse has told how on the first Sunday of that month Browning and he sat together "in a sequestered part of the beautiful Fellows' Garden of Trinity," under a cloudless sky, amid the early foliage with double hawthorns in bloom, and how the old man, in a mood of serenity and without his usual gesticulation, talked of his own early life and aspirations. He shrank that summer, says Mrs Orr, from the fatigue of a journey to Italy and thought of Scotland as a place of rest. But unfavourable weather in early August forbade the execution of the plan. An invitation from Mrs Bronson to her house at Asolo, to be followed by the pleasure of seeing his son and his son's wife in the Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice, were attractions not to be resisted, and in company with Miss Browning, he reached the little hill-town that had grown so dear to him without mishap and even without fatigue.
To the early days of July, shortly before his departure for Italy, belong two incidents which may be placed side by side as exhibiting two contrasted sides of Browning's character. On the 5th of that month he dined with the Shah, who begged for the gift of one of his books. Next day he chose a volume the binding of which might, as he says, "take the imperial eye"; but the pleasure of the day was another gift, a gift to a person who was not imperial. "I said to myself," he wrote to his young friend the painter Lehmann's daughter, addressed in the letter as "My beloved Alma"—"I said to myself 'Here do I present my poetry to a personage for whom I do not care three straws; why should I not venture to do as much for a young lady I love dearly, who, for the author's sake, will not impossibly care rather for the inside than the outside of the volume?' So I was bold enough to take one and offer it for your kind acceptance, begging you to remember in days to come that the author, whether a good poet or not, was always, my Alma, your affectionate friend, Robert Browning." A gracious bowing of old age over the grace and charm of youth! But the work of two days later, July 8th, was not gracious. The lines "To Edward Fitzgerald," printed in The Athenaeum, were dated on that day. It is stated by Mrs Orr that when they were despatched to the journal in which they appeared, Browning regretted the deed, though afterwards he found reasons to justify himself. Fitzgerald's reference to Mrs Browning caused him a spasm of pain and indignation, nor did the pain for long subside. The expression of his indignation was outrageous in manner, and deficient in real power. He had read a worse meaning into the unhappy words than had been intended, and the writer was dead. Browning's act was like an involuntary muscular contraction, which he could not control. The lines sprang far more from love than from hate. "I felt as if she had died yesterday," he said. We cannot regret that Browning was capable of such an offence; we can only regret that what should have controlled his cry of pain and rage did not operate at the right moment.
In Asolo, beside "the gate," Mrs Bronson had found and partly made what Mr Henry James describes as "one of the quaintest possible little places of villegiatura"—La Mura, the house, "resting half upon the dismantled, dissimulated town-wall. No sweeter spot in all the sweetnesses of Italy." Browning's last visit to Asolo was a time of almost unmingled enjoyment. "He seemed possessed," writes Mrs Orr, "by a strange buoyancy, an almost feverish joy in life." The thought that he was in Asolo again, which he had first seen in his twenty-sixth year, and since then had never ceased to remember with affection, was a happy wonder to him. He would stand delighted on the loggia of La Mura, looking out over the plain and identifying the places of historical interest, some of which were connected with his own "Sordello." Nor was the later story forgotten of Queen Caterina Cornaro, whose palace-tower overlooks Asolo, and whose secretary, Cardinal Bembo, wrote gli Asolani, from which came the suggestion for the title of Browning's forthcoming volume. At times, as Mrs Bronson relates, the beauty of the prospect was enough, with no historical reminiscences, the plain with its moving shadows, the mountain-ranges to the west, and southwards the delicate outline of the Euganean Hills. "I was right," said he, "to fall in love with this place fifty years ago, was I not?"
The procedure of the day at Asolo was almost as regular as that of a London day. The morning walk with his sister, when everything that was notable was noted by his keen eyes, the return, English newspapers, proof-sheets, correspondence, the light mid-day meal, the afternoon drive in Mrs Branson's carriage, tea upon the loggia, the evening with music or reading, or visits to the little theatre—these constituted an almost unvarying and happy routine. On his walks he delighted to recognise little details of architecture which he had observed in former years; or he would peer into the hedgerows and watch the living creatures that lurked there, or would "whistle softly to the lizards basking on the low walls which border the roads, to try his old power of attracting them."[[145]] Sometimes a longer drive (and that to Bassano was his favourite) required an earlier start in the carriage with luncheon at some little inn. "If we were ever late in returning to Asolo," Mrs Bronson writes, "he would say 'Tell Vittorio to drive quickly; we must not lose the sunset from the loggia.' ... Often after a storm, the effects of sun breaking through clouds before its setting, combined with the scenery of plain and mountain, were such as to rouse the poet to the greatest enthusiasm. Heedless of cold or damp, forgetting himself completely, though warmly wrapped to please others, he would gaze on the changing aspects of earth and sky until darkness covered everything from his sight."
When in the evenings Browning read aloud he did not, like Tennyson, as described by Mr Rossetti, allow his voice to "sway onward with a long-drawn chaunt" which gave "noble value and emphasis to the metrical structure and pauses." His delivery was full and distinctive, but it "took much less account than Tennyson's of the poem as a rhythmical whole; his delivery had more affinity to that of an actor, laying stress on all the light and shade of the composition—its touches of character, the conversational points, its dramatic give-and-take. In those qualities of elocution in which Tennyson was strong, and aimed to be strong, Browning was contentedly weak; and vice versâ."[[146]] Sometimes, like another great poet, Pope, he was deeply affected by the passion of beauty or heroism or pathos in what he read, and could not control his feelings. Mrs Orr mentions that in reading aloud his translation of the Herakles, he, like Pope in reading a passage of his Iliad, was moved to tears. Dr Furnivall tells of the mounting excitement with which he once delivered in the writer's hearing his Ixion. When at La Mura after his dreamy playing, on a spinet of 1522, old airs, melodious, melancholy airs, Browning would propose to read aloud, it was not his own poetry that he most willingly chose. "No R.B. to-night," he would say; "then with a smile, 'Let us have some real poetry'"; and the volume would be one by Shelley or Keats, or Coleridge or Tennyson. It was as a punishment to his hostess for the crime of having no Shakespeare on her shelves that he threatened her with one of his "toughest poems"; but the tough poem, interpreted by his emphasis and pauses, became "as clear and comprehensible as one could possibly desire." In his talk at Asolo "he seemed purposely to avoid deep and serious topics. If such were broached in his presence he dismissed them with one strong, convincing sentence, and adroitly turned the current of conversation into a shallower channel."
A project which came very near his heart was that of purchasing from the municipal authorities a small piece of ground, divided from La Mura by a ravine clothed with olive and other trees, "on which stood an unfinished building"—the words are Mrs Bronson's—"commanding the finest view in Asolo." He desired much to have a summer or autumn abode to which he might turn with the assurance of rest in what most pleased and suited him. In imagination, with his characteristic eagerness, he had already altered and added to the existing structure, and decided on the size and aspect of the loggia which was to out-rival that of La Mura. "'It shall have a tower,' he said, 'whence I can see Venice at every hour of the day, and I shall call it "Pippa's Tower".... We will throw a rustic bridge across the streamlet in the ravine.'" And then, in a graver mood: "It may not be for me to enjoy it long—who can say? But it will be useful for Pen and his family.... But I am good for ten years yet." And when his son visited Asolo and approved of the project of Pippa's Tower, Browning's happiness in his dream was complete. It was on the night of his death that the authorities of Asolo decided that the purchase might be carried into effect.
