“No, the book
    Which noticed how the wall-growths wave,” said she,
    “Was not by Ruskin.” 
     I said “Vernon Lee.”

And in the uttered “Vernon Lee” lies a vast renunciation half comical and wholly tragic.  There are jests in the volume, and these, with the exception of Ponte dell’ Angelo, have the merit of brevity; they buzz swiftly in and out, and do not wind about us with the terror of voluminous coils, as sometimes happens when Browning is in his mood of mirth.  There are stories, and they are told with spirit and with skill.  In Beatrice Signorini the story-teller does justice to the honest jealousy of a wife and to the honest love of a husband who returns from the wanderings of his imagination to the frank fidelity of his heart.  Cynicism grows genial in the jest of The Pope and the Net.  In Muckle-Mouth Meg, laughter and kisses, audible from the page, and a woman’s art in love-craft, turn tragedy in a hearty piece of comedy. The Bean-Feast presents us with the latest transformation of the Herakles ideal, where a good Christian Herakles, Pope Sixtus of Rome, makes common cause with his spiritual children in their humble pleasures of the senses.  And in contrast with this poem of the religion of joy is the story of another ruler of Rome, the too fortunate Emperor Augustus, who, in the shadow of the religion of fear and sorrow, must propitiate the envy of Fate by turning beggar once a year.  A shivering thrill runs through us as we catch a sight of the supreme mendicant’s “sparkling eyes beneath their eyebrows’ ridge”: 

    “He’s God!” shouts Lucius Varus Rufus:  “Man
    And worms’-meat any moment!” mutters low
    Some Power, admonishing the mortal-born.

There were nobler sides of Paganism than this with which Browning seems never to have had an adequate sympathy.  And yet the religion even of Marcus Aurelius lacked something of the joy of the religion of the thankful Pope who feasted upon beans.[144]

In the winter which followed his change of abode from Warwick Crescent to the more commodious house in De Vere Gardens, the winter of 1887-1888, Browning’s health and strength visibly declined; a succession of exhausting colds lowered his vitality; yet he maintained his habitual ways of life, and would not yield.  In August 1888 he started ill for his Italian holiday, and travelled with difficulty and distress.  But the rest among the mountains at Primiero restored him.  At Venice he seemed as vigorous as he was joyous.  And when he returned to London in February 1889 the improvement in his strength was in a considerable measure maintained.  Yet it was evident that the physical vigour which had seemed invincible was on the ebb.  In the early summer he paid the last of those visits, which he so highly valued, to Balliol College, Oxford.  The opening week of June found him at Cambridge.  Mr Gosse has told how on the first Sunday of that month Browning and he sat together