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.’