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.