quire still more bracing air than the
gently lulling temperature of Wales. May it be doing you, and dear Sir
Theodore, all the good you deserve--throwing in the share due to us, who
must forego it! With all love from us both, ever affectionately yours
Robert Browning.

* Those of Mr. Alexander Malcolm.

He did start for Italy on the following day, but had become so ill, that
he was on the point of postponing his departure. He suffered throughout
the journey as he had never suffered on any journey before; and during
his first few days at Primiero, could only lead the life of an invalid.
He rallied, however, as usual, under the potent effects of quiet,
fresh air, and sunshine; and fully recovered his normal state before
proceeding to Venice, where the continued sense of physical health
combined with many extraneous circumstances to convert his proposed
short stay into a long one. A letter from the mountains, addressed to a
lady who had never been abroad, and to whom he sometimes wrote with more
descriptive detail than to other friends, gives a touching glimpse of
his fresh delight in the beauties of nature, and his tender constant
sympathy with the animal creation.

Primiero: Sept. 7, '88.

. . . . .

'The weather continues exquisitely temperate, yet sunny, ever since the
clearing thunderstorm of which I must have told you in my last. It is, I
am more and more confirmed in believing, the most beautiful place I
was ever resident in: far more so than Gressoney or even St.-Pierre de
Chartreuse. You would indeed delight in seeing the magnificence of the
mountains,--the range on either side, which morning and evening, in
turn, transmute literally to gold,--I mean what I say. Their utterly
bare ridges of peaks and crags of all shape, quite naked of verdure,
glow like yellow ore; and, at times, there is a silver change, as the
sun prevails or not.

'The valley is one green luxuriance on all sides; Indian corn, with
beans, gourds, and even cabbages, filling up the interstices; and the
flowers, though not presenting any novelty to my uninstructed eyes,
yet surely more large and purely developed than I remember to have seen
elsewhere. For instance, the tiger-lilies in the garden here must be
above ten feet high, every bloom faultless, and, what strikes me as
peculiar, every leaf on the stalk from bottom to top as perfect as if no
insect existed to spoil them by a notch or speck. . . .

'. . . Did I tell you we had a