The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning

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СКАЧАТЬ removed his hat in returning the salutation of a priest, and touched his hat in returning the salutation of the poorest peasant, who, after the manner of the country, lifted his own to greet the passing stranger. ‘I always salute the church,’ Mr. Browning would say; ‘I respect it.’”

      All his life Browning was an early riser. In Asolo, as elsewhere, he began his day with a cold bath at seven, and at eight he and his sister sat down to their simple breakfast, their hostess keeping no such heroic hours. Mrs. Bronson had adopted the foreign fashion of having her light breakfast served in her room, and her mornings were given to her wide correspondence and her own reading and study. She was a most accomplished and scholarly woman, whose goodness of heart and charm of manner were paralleled by her range of intellectual interests and her grasp of affairs.

After breakfasting Browning and his sister, inseparable companions always, would start off on their wanderings over the hills. The poet was keenly interested in searching out the points of interest of his early years in Asolo; the “echo,” the remembered views, the vista whose fascination still remained for him. From the ruined rocca that crowned the hill, the view comprised all the violet-hued plain, stretching away to Padua, Vicenzo, Bassano; the entire atmosphere filled with historic and poetic associations. How the poet mirrored the panorama in his stanzas:

      “How many a year, my Asolo,

       Since—one step just from sea to land—

       I found you, loved yet feared you so—

       For natural objects seemed to stand

       Palpably fire-clothed! No—”

      The “lambent flame,” and “Italia’s rare, o’er-running beauty,” enchanted his vision.

      Returning from their saunterings, the brother and sister took up their morning reading of English and French newspapers, Italian books, with the poet’s interludes always of his beloved Greek dramatists.

      In these October days the Storys arrived to visit Mrs. Bronson in her picturesque abode. An ancient wall, mostly in ruins, with eighteen towers, still surrounds Asolo, and partly in one of these towers, and partly in the arch of the old portal, “La Mura” was half discovered and half constructed. Its loggia had one wall composed entirely of sliding glass, which could be a shelter from the storm with no obstruction of the view, or be thrown open to all the bloom and beauty of the radiant summer. Just across the street was the apartment in which Mrs. Bronson bestowed her guests.

That Browning and Story should thus be brought together again for their last meeting on earth, however undreamed of to them, prefigures itself now as another of those mosaic-like events that combined in beauty and loveliness to make all his last months on earth a poetic sequence. The Storys afterward spoke of Mr. Browning as being “well, and in such force, brilliant, and delightful as ever”; and the last words that passed between the poet and the sculptor were these of Browning’s: “We have been friends for forty years, forty years without a break!”

      On the first day of November this perfect and final visit to Asolo ended, and yielding to the entreaties of his son, Browning and his sister bade farewell to Mrs. Bronson and her daughter, who were soon to follow them to Venice, where the poet and Miss Browning were to be the guests of the Barrett Brownings in Palazzo Rezzonico.

      The events of all these weeks seem divinely appointed to complete with stately symmetry this noble life. As one of them he found in Venice his old friend, and (as has before been said) the greatest interpreter of his poetry, Dr. Hiram Corson. The Cornell professor was taking his University Sabbatical year, and with Mrs. Corson had arrived in Venice just before the poet came down from Asolo. “I called on him the next day,” Dr. Corson said of this meeting. “He seemed in his usual vigor, and expressed great pleasure in the restorations his son was making in the palace. ‘It’s a grand edifice,’ he said, ‘but too vast.’”

      Dr. Corson continued:

      “He was then engaged in reading the proofs of his ‘Asolando.’ He usually walked two hours every day; went frequently in his gondola with his sister to his beloved Lido, and one day when I walked with him

      ‘Where St. Mark’s is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings,’

      I had to quicken my steps to keep pace with him. He called my attention to an interesting feature of this world-renowned place, and told me much of their strange history. He knew the city literally par cœur.”

      Professor Hiram Corson

       From a painting by J. Colin Forbes, R.A., in the possession of Eugene Rollin Corson.

Mr. Browning passed with Dr. and Mrs. Corson the last morning they were in Venice. Of the parting Dr. Corson has since written in a personal letter to a friend:

      “He told us much about himself; about Asolo, which he had first visited more than fifty years before, during his visit to Italy in 1838, when, as he says in the Prologue to ‘Asolando,’ alluding to ‘the burning bush,’

      ‘Natural objects seemed to stand

       Palpably fire-clothed.’

      “A servant announcing that the gondola had come to take us to the railway station, he rose from his chair, and said, ‘Now be sure to visit me next May, in London. You’ll remember where my little house is in De Vere Gardens’; and bidding us a cordial good-bye, with a ‘God bless you both,’ he hastened away. We little thought, full of life as he then was, that we should see him no more in this world.”

      To a letter from Miss Browning to their hostess, Browning added:

      Dearest Mrs. Bronson,—I am away from you in one sense, never to be away from the thought of you, and your inexpressible kindness. I trust you will see your way to returning soon. Venice is not herself without you, in my eyes—I dare say this is a customary phrase, but you well know what reason I have to use it, with a freshness as if it were inspired for the first time. Come, bringing news of Edith, and the doings in the house, and above all of your own health and spirits and so rejoice

      Ever your affectionate

       Robert Browning.

With another letter of his sister’s to their beloved friend and hostess, Mr. Browning sent the following note,—perhaps the last lines that he ever wrote to Mrs. Bronson, as she returned almost immediately to Casa Alvisi, and the daily personal intercourse renewed itself to be broken only by his illness and death. The poet wrote:

      Palazzo Rezzonico, Nov. 5th, 1889.

      Dearest Friend,—A word to slip into the letter of Sarianna, which I cannot see go without a scrap of mine. (Come and see Pen and you will easily concert things with him.) I have all confidence in his knowledge and power.

      I delight in hearing how comfortably all is proceeding with you at La Mura. I want to say that having finished the first two volumes of Gozzi, I brought the third with me to finish at my leisure and return to you; and particularly I may mention that the edition is very rare and valuable. It appears that Symmonds has just thought it worth while to translate the work, and he was six months finding a copy to translate from!

      ... I have got—since three or four days—the whole of my new volume in type, and expect to send it back, corrected, by to-morrow at latest. But I must continue at my work lest interruptions occur, СКАЧАТЬ