"As for me, I remember that the accounts of the depreciation of
the value of houses, coupled with the indifference of the
inhabitants of them, were enough to set one dreaming (in one's
gondola!) of getting to be as rich as Rothschild, buying all
Venice, turning out everybody, and ensconcing one's self in the
Doge's palace, among the dropping gold ornaments and flakes of
what was lustrous color in Titian's or Tintoret's time, waiting
for the proper consummation of all things and the sea's advent.
"But do you really find the air so light and pure in this by
right mephitic time of August, with those close calles,
pestilential lagunes, etc., etc., and all that our informants
frighten us with? Should a winter in Venice prove no more
formidable in its way than it seems a summer does, why, we may
have cause to regret our determination to give up our original
plans. I am sure your kindness will tell us, should it be
enabled, any good news of the winter and spring climate--if
weak lungs may brave it with impunity."....
To this letter of Browning's, written in his young manhood--he was then thirty-five--about the Venice which always charmed him, may be well added the words of the Lady of Mura, written only a few weeks before the poet's death. Asolo is a sequestered town, which Browning said that he discovered, and in which he fell under the glamour of very Italy. In the prologue to his last volume, written in September before the letter that follows, the poet says:
"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!"
The letter says:
"I have bought in ancient Asolo a narrow, tall tower, into which
in the last century (very early) a house was built, and this
curious place I have selected for villeggiatura when the
scirocco is too strong in Venice for health or comfort. It was
here that Browning fifty years ago was inspired to write
'Sordello' and 'Pippa Passes,' so to me it has that charm added
to many others. It is such a rough and out-of-the-way little
place that you may only know it by name. There is no hotel, no
railway, no factory, no sign of modern civilization. It is on a
hill, which has an ancient ruined fortress at the top, and was
an old Roman settlement, with the usual Roman mise en scene,
baths, amphitheatre, etc., in the days of Pliny, who somewhere
mentions it.
"Near my tower, which is built in the ancient wall of the
mediaeval town, is the tower of Caterina Cornaro, and one sees
from most of my windows, so high are they, the whole Marca
Trevigiana, with its tragic and dramatic associations of the
early Middle Ages; the Eccelini, the Azzi, the incessant wars
in which towns were treated by the tyrants like shuttlecocks in
the game of battledoor.
"Browning and his sister have been here for the last six weeks,
and you may fancy how intensely the poet enjoys revisiting
after so many years the scenes of his youthful inspirations. He
was only twenty-five or six when he first discovered Asolo....
Few young people are so gay and cheerful as he and his dear old
sister."....
It is a pleasant last glimpse of Browning at Asolo, where the master-spell of Italy first touched his genius, and whither at the end he came--"asolare, to disport in the open air, amuse one's self at random"--at heart and in temper of the same unquenched and unquenchable vitality as on that summer day long ago when he sat where Milton had sat, and pressed, as Milton had pressed, the keys of the organ at Vallombrosa.
"Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?--
How strange it seems and new!"