CHAPTER VIII.

THE LAST DECADE.

Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiled.


Since the catastrophe of 1861 Browning had not entered Italy. In the
autumn of 1878 he once more bent his steps thither. Florence, indeed, he
refused to revisit; it was burnt in upon his brain by memories
intolerably dear. But in Venice the charm of Italy reasserted itself,
and he returned during his remaining autumns with increasing frequency
to the old-fashioned hostelry, Dell' Universo, on the Grand Canal, or
latterly, to the second home provided by the hospitality of his gifted
and congenial American friend, Mrs Arthur Bronson. Asolo, too, the town
of Pippa, he saw again, after forty years' absence, with poignant
feelings,--"such things have begun and ended with me in the interval!"
But the poignancy of memory did not restore the magic of perception
which had once been his. The mood described ten years later in the
Prologue to _Asolando_ was already dominant: the iris glow of youth no
longer glorified every common object of the natural world, but "a flower
was just a flower." The glory still came by moments; some of his most
thrilling outbursts of song belong to this time. But he built up no more
great poems. He was approaching seventy, and it might well seem that if
so prolific a versifier was not likely to become silent his poetry was
rapidly resolving itself into wastes of theological argument, of