I go in the rain, and, more than needs,
A rope cuts both my wrists behind;
And I think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds,
For they fling, whoever has a mind,
Stones at me for my year's misdeeds.
Thus I entered Brescia, and thus I go!
In triumphs, people have dropped down dead.
"Thou, paid by the World,—what dost thou owe
Me?" God might question: but now instead,
'Tis God shall requite! I am safer so.
In all these, as in Childe Roland, that forlorn romance of dreary and depressed heroism, "the trumpet-note of the soul's victory rings through the darkness of terrestrial defeat":
Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears
Of all the lost adventurers my peers,—
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.
There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set
And blew, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."
... At noon, Browning would make a second and more substantial breakfast on Italian dishes; and at three o'clock regularly, a friend's gondola, which was always at hand to convey him, came and carried him, usually, to the Lido,—his favourite spot. "I walk, even in wind or rain," he wrote, "for a couple of hours on Lido, and enjoy the break of sea on the strip of sand, as much as Shelley did in those old days.... Go there,—if only to be blown about by the sea-wind!" The sea-wind, indeed, was the very utterance of his own robust and vigorous nature, his keen alertness of sense, and his impetuous, impulsive spirit.
In the course of the afternoon, he would explore Venice in all directions, studying her multitudinous points of interest and beauty. The daughter of his hostess, Mrs. Bronson, sometimes companioned him on these excursions, guiding him through the narrow by-streets, or examining, with him, the monuments, sculptures and frescoes of the churches.
Art, in its various manifestations, had been a life-long study with Browning. He took great delight in modelling in clay, and had for some while studied sculpture under Story. He possessed the artistic temperament—fiery, nervous, susceptible—in its sanest form: and not only was he able to express all an artist's aims, ambitions, and despairs, but to arrive in all his poems, at one point or other, at a superb pictorial moment. Some of his lines are penetrated from end to end with this remarkable pictorial quality: perhaps the most notable example is Love Among the Ruins, with its triple contrast,—the infinite calm of the pasture-lands prolonging themselves into the sunset, the noise and vital movement which had filled the now-vanished city,—and the lover, endeavouring to curb his impatience for the one beloved face by dwelling on these outward things: