“in a sequestered part of the beautiful Fellows’ Garden of Trinity,” under a cloudless sky, amid the early foliage with double hawthorns in bloom, and how the old man, in a mood of serenity and without his usual gesticulation, talked of his own early life and aspirations.  He shrank that summer, says Mrs Orr, from the fatigue of a journey to Italy and thought of Scotland as a place of rest.  But unfavourable weather in early August forbade the execution of the plan.  An invitation from Mrs Bronson to her house at Asolo, to be followed by the pleasure of seeing his son and his son’s wife in the Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice, were attractions not to be resisted, and in company with Miss Browning, he reached the little hill-town that had grown so dear to him without mishap and even without fatigue.

To the early days of July, shortly before his departure for Italy, belong two incidents which may be placed side by side as exhibiting two contrasted sides of Browning’s character.  On the 5th of that month he dined with the Shah, who begged for the gift of one of his books.  Next day he chose a volume the binding of which might, as he says, “take the imperial eye”; but the pleasure of the day was another gift, a gift to a person who was not imperial.  “I said to myself,” he wrote to his young friend the painter Lehmann’s daughter, addressed in the letter as “My beloved Alma”—­“I said to myself ’Here do I present my poetry to a personage for whom I do not care three straws; why should I not venture to do as much for a young lady I love dearly, who, for the author’s sake, will not impossibly care rather for the inside than the outside of the volume?’ So I was bold enough to take one and offer it for your kind acceptance, begging you to remember in days to come that the author, whether a good poet or not, was always, my Alma, your affectionate friend, Robert Browning.”  A gracious bowing of old age over the grace and charm of youth!  But the work of two days later, July 8th, was not gracious.  The lines “To Edward Fitzgerald,” printed in The Athenaeum, were dated on that day.  It is stated by Mrs Orr that when they were despatched to the journal in which they appeared, Browning regretted the deed, though afterwards he found reasons to justify himself.  Fitzgerald’s reference to Mrs Browning caused him a spasm of pain and indignation, nor did the pain for long subside.  The expression of his indignation was outrageous in manner, and deficient in real power.  He had read a worse meaning into the unhappy words than had been intended, and the writer was dead.  Browning’s act was like an involuntary muscular contraction, which he could not control.  The lines sprang far more from love than from hate.  “I felt as if she had died yesterday,” he said.  We cannot regret that Browning was capable of such an offence; we can only regret that what should have controlled his cry of pain and rage did not operate at the right moment.