is, his first love among Italian cities, at a season of the
year more favourable to its beauty than even that of his first visit;
yet he must himself have been surprised by the new rapture of admiration
which it created in him, and which seemed to grow with his lengthened
stay. This state of mind was the more striking, that new symptoms of his
physical decline were now becoming apparent, and were in themselves of a
depressing kind. He wrote to a friend in England, that the atmosphere
of Asolo, far from being oppressive, produced in him all the effects of
mountain air, and he was conscious of difficulty of breathing whenever
he walked up hill. He also suffered, as the season advanced, great
inconvenience from cold. The rooms occupied by himself and his sister
were both unprovided with fireplaces; and though the daily dinner with
Mrs. Bronson obviated the discomfort of the evenings, there remained
still too many hours of the autumnal day in which the impossibility of
heating their own little apartment must have made itself unpleasantly
felt. The latter drawback would have been averted by the fulfilment of
Mr. Browning's first plan, to be in Venice by the beginning of October,
and return to the comforts of his own home before the winter had quite
set in; but one slight motive for delay succeeded another, till at last
a more serious project introduced sufficient ground of detention. He
seemed possessed by a strange buoyancy--an almost feverish joy in life,
which blunted all sensations of physical distress, or helped him to
misinterpret them. When warned against the imprudence of remaining where
he knew he suffered from cold, and believed, rightly or wrongly, that
his asthmatic tendencies were increased, he would reply that he was
growing acclimatized--that he was quite well. And, in a fitful or
superficial sense, he must have been so.

His letters of that period are one continuous picture, glowing with
his impressions of the things which they describe. The same words will
repeat themselves as the same subject presents itself to his pen; but
the impulse to iteration scarcely ever affects us as mechanical.
It seems always a fresh response to some new stimulus to thought or
feeling, which he has received. These reach him from every side. It is
not only the Asolo of this peaceful later time which has opened before
him, but the Asolo of 'Pippa Passes' and 'Sordello'; that which first
stamped itself on his imagination in the echoe