In Asolo, beside “the gate,” Mrs Bronson had found and partly made what Mr Henry James describes as “one of the quaintest possible little places of villegiatura”—­La Mura, the house, “resting half upon the dismantled, dissimulated town-wall.  No sweeter spot in all the sweetnesses of Italy.”  Browning’s last visit to Asolo was a time of almost unmingled enjoyment.  “He seemed possessed,” writes Mrs Orr, “by a strange buoyancy, an almost feverish joy in life.”  The thought that he was in Asolo again, which he had first seen in his twenty-sixth year, and since then had never ceased to remember with affection, was a happy wonder to him.  He would stand delighted on the loggia of La Mura, looking out over the plain and identifying the places of historical interest, some of which were connected with his own “Sordello.”  Nor was the later story forgotten of Queen Caterina Cornaro, whose palace-tower overlooks Asolo, and whose secretary, Cardinal Bembo, wrote gli Asolani, from which came the suggestion for the title of Browning’s forthcoming volume.  At times, as Mrs Bronson relates, the beauty of the prospect was enough, with no historical reminiscences, the plain with its moving shadows, the mountain-ranges to the west, and southwards the delicate outline of the Euganean Hills.  “I was right,” said he, “to fall in love with this place fifty years ago, was I not?”

The procedure of the day at Asolo was almost as regular as that of a London day.  The morning walk with his sister, when everything that was notable was noted by his keen eyes, the return, English newspapers, proof-sheets, correspondence, the light mid-day meal, the afternoon drive in Mrs Branson’s carriage, tea upon the loggia, the evening with music or reading, or visits to the little theatre—­these constituted an almost unvarying and happy routine.  On his walks he delighted to recognise little details of architecture which he had observed in former years; or he would peer into the hedgerows and watch the living creatures that lurked there, or would “whistle softly to the lizards basking on the low walls which border the roads, to try his old power of attracting them."[145] Sometimes a longer drive (and that to Bassano was his favourite) required an earlier start in the carriage with luncheon at some little inn.  “If we were ever late in returning to Asolo,” Mrs Bronson writes, “he would say ’Tell Vittorio to drive quickly; we must not lose the sunset from the loggia.’ ...  Often after a storm, the effects of sun breaking through clouds before its setting, combined with the scenery of plain and mountain, were such as to rouse the poet to the greatest enthusiasm.  Heedless of cold or damp, forgetting himself completely, though warmly wrapped to please others, he would gaze on the changing aspects of earth and sky until darkness covered everything from his sight.”