Asolando (a name taken from the invented verb Asolare, “to disport in the open air”) was published on the day of Browning’s death.  He died in Venice, and his body was brought to England, and buried in Westminster Abbey on the last day of the year.  The Abbey was invisible in the fog, and, inside, dim yellow fog filled all the roof, above the gas and the candles.  The coffin, carried high, came into the church to the sound of processional music, and as one waited near the grave one saw the coffin and the wreaths on it, over the heads of the people, and heard, in Dr. Bridge’s setting, the words:  “He giveth his beloved sleep.”

Reading Asolando once more, and remembering that coffin one had looked down upon in the Abbey, only then quite feeling that all was indeed over, it is perhaps natural that the book should come to seem almost consciously testamentary, as if certain things in it had been really meant for a final leave-taking.  The Epilogue is a clear, brave looking-forward to death, as to an event now close at hand, and imagined as actually accomplished.  It breaks through for once, as if at last the occasion demanded it, a reticence never thus broken through before, claiming, with a supreme self-confidence, calmly, as an acknowledged right, the “Well done” of the faithful servant at the end of the long day’s labour.  In Reverie, in Rephan, and in other poems, the teachings of a lifetime are enforced with a final emphasis, there is the same joyous readiness to “aspire yet never attain;” the same delight in the beauty and strangeness of life, in the “wild joy of living,” in woman, in art, in scholarship; and in Rosny we have the vision of a hero dead on the field of victory, with the comment, “That is best.”

To those who value Browning, not as the poet of metaphysics, but as the poet of life, his last book will be singularly welcome.  Something like metaphysics we find, indeed, but humanised, made poetry, in the blank verse of Development, the lyrical verse of the Prologue, and the third of the Bad Dreams, with their subtle comments and surmises on the relations of art with nature, of nature with truth.  But it is life itself, a final flame, perhaps mortally bright, that burns and shines in the youngest of Browning’s books.  The book will be not less welcome to those who feel that the finest poetic work is usually to be found in short pieces, and that even The Ring and the Book would scarcely be an equivalent for the fifty Men and Women of those two incomparable volumes of 1855.  Nor is Asolando without a further attractiveness to those who demand in poetry a certain fleeting and evanescent grace.

      “Car nous voulons la Nuance encor,
      Pas la Couleur, rien que la Nuance,”