be advantageously disposed of at the drawing-board or in thumping wet clay, some of the forces proper to the poet were not drawn away and dissipated by the incessant demands of Society; whether while a sufficient fund of energy for the double life was present with Browning, the peculiar energy of the poet did not undergo a certain deterioration.  The doctrine of the superiority of the heart to the intellect is more and more preached in Browning’s poetry; but the doctrine itself is an act of the intellect.  The poet need not perhaps insist on the doctrine if he creates—­as Browning did in earlier years—­beautiful things which commend themselves, without a preacher, to our love.

In the autumn of 1878, after seventeen years of absence from Italy, Browning was recaptured by its charm, and henceforward to the close of his life Venice and the Venetian district became his accustomed place of summer refreshment and repose.  For a time, with his sister as his companion, he paused at a hotel near the summit of the Spluegen, enjoyed the mountain air, walked vigorously, and wrote, with great rapidity, says Mrs Orr, his poem of Russia, Ivan Ivanovitch.  When a boy he had read in Bunyan’s “Life and Death of Mr Badman” the story of “Old Tod”, and with this still vivid in his memory, he added to his Russian tale the highly unidyllic “idyl” of English life, Ned Bratts.  It was thus that subjects for poems suddenly presented themselves to Browning, often rising up as it were spontaneously out of the remote past.  “There comes up unexpectedly,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, “some subject for poetry, which has been dormant, and apparently dead, for perhaps dozens of years.  A month since I wrote a poem of some two hundred lines [’Donald’] about a story I heard more than forty years ago, and never dreamed of trying to repeat, wondering how it had so long escaped me; and so it has been with my best things."[127] Before the close of September the travellers were in a rough but pleasant albergo at Asolo, which Browning had not seen since his first Italian journey more than forty years previously.  “Such things,” he writes, “have begun and ended with me in the interval!” Changes had taken place in the little city; yet much seemed familiar and therefore the more dreamlike.  The place had indeed haunted him in his dreams; he would find himself travelling with a friend, or some mysterious stranger, when suddenly the little town sparkling in the sunshine would rise before him.  “Look! look there is Asolo,” he would cry, “do let us go there!” And always, after the way of dreams, his companions would declare it impossible and he would be hurried away.[128] From the time that he actually saw again the city that he loved this recurring dream was to come no more.  He wandered through the well-known places, and seeking for an echo in the Rocca, the ruined fortress above the town, he found that it had not lost its tongue.  A fortnight at Venice in a hotel where quiet and coolness