of the nearing end.

Yet no such prescience appears to have been his. His buoyant confidence
in his own vitality held its own. He was full of schemes of work. At the
end of October the idyllic days at Asolo ended, and Browning repaired
for the last time to the Palazzo Rezzonico. A month later he caught a
bronchial catarrh; failure of the heart set in, and on the evening of
December 12 he peacefully died. On the last day of the year his body was
laid to rest in "Poets' Corner."




PART II.

BROWNING'S MIND AND ART




CHAPTER IX.

THE POET.

Then, who helps more, pray, to repair our loss--
Another Boehme with a tougher book
And subtler meanings of what roses say,--
Or some stout Mage, like him of Halberstadt,
John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about?
He with a "look you!" vents a brace of rhymes,