an octave, beating time to the simple but stirring old march of Avison “whilom of Newcastle organist”; and before he has done, the memory masters him, and the pedestrian blank verse breaks into a hymn “rough, rude, robustious, homely heart athrob” to Pym the “man of men.”  Or he calls up Bernard Mandeville to confute the formidable pessimism of his old friend Carlyle—­“whose groan I hear, with guffaw at the end disposing of mock—­melancholy.”  Gerard de Lairesse, whose rococo landscapes had interested him as a boy, he introduces only to typify an outworn way of art—­the mythic treatment of nature; but he illustrates this “inferior” way with a splendour of poetry that makes his ironic exposure dangerously like an unwitting vindication.  These visions of Prometheus on the storm-swept crag, of Artemis hunting in the dawn, show that Browning was master, if he had cared to use it, of that magnificent symbolic speech elicited from Greek myth in the Hyperion or the Prometheus Unbound.  But it was a foreign idiom to him, and his occasional use of it a tour de force.

Two years only now remained for Browning, and it began to be apparent to his friends that his sturdy health was no longer secure.  His way of life underwent no change, he was as active in society as ever, and acquaintances, old and new, still claimed his time, and added to the burden, always cheerfully endured, of his correspondence.  In October 1887 the marriage of his son attached him by a new tie to Italy, and the Palazzo Rezzonico on the Grand Canal, where “Pen” and his young American wife presently settled, was to be his last, as it was his most magnificent, abode.  To Venice he turned his steps each autumn of these last two years; lingering by the way among the mountains or in the beautiful border region at their feet.  It was thus that, in the early autumn of 1889, he came yet once again to Asolo.  His old friend and hostess, Mrs Arthur Bronson, had discovered a pleasant, airy abode on the old town-wall, overhanging a ravine, and Asolo, seen from this “castle precipice-encurled,” recovered all its old magic.  It was here that he put together the disconnected pieces, many written during the last two years in London, others at Asolo itself, which were finally published on the day of his death.  The Tower of Queen Cornaro still overlooked the little town, as it had done half a century before; and he attached these last poems to the same tradition by giving them the pleasant title said to have been invented by her secretary. Asolando—­Facts and Fancies, both titles contain a hint of the ageing Browning,—­the relaxed physical energy which allows this strenuous waker to dream (Reverie; Bad Dreams); the flagging poetic power, whose fitful flashes could no longer transfigure the world for him, but only cast a fantastic flicker at moments across its prosaic features.  The opening lines sadly confess the wane of the old vision:—­