ss, had been contemplating, for the study of Browning's poetry. I
told him of what I had done at Cornell University, the previous four
or five years, in a Browning Club composed of Professors and their
wives, and in my University classes. It was decided that the London
Browning Society should be organized in October; and I engaged to go
over to England the following June, and read a paper before the
Society; which I did at its eighth meeting, on the 23d of June, the
subject of the paper being 'The Idea of Personality as embodied in
Robert Browning's Poetry, and of Art as an intermediate Agency of
Personality.'"

Another source of joy to Browning, and one that far exceeded that of any
recognition of himself, was the increasing recognition of his son's
achievements in art. Barrett Browning was at this time a pupil of Rodin in
Paris, devoting himself to sculpture with the same ardor that he gave to
his painting. As to which expression in art was the more his metier, _chi
lo sa_? The young man was the child of the muses, and all forms of art
were to him a temperamental inheritance.

Oxford again honored Browning, this time in the June of 1882, with the
degree of D.C.L. "I never saw my father happier than on this occasion,"
Mr. Barrett Browning said to the writer of this volume when questioned
regarding it; and another observer who was present speaks of Browning's
distinction in his red Oxford gown, his shoulders thrown back, and his
swift, light step. One of the humors of the occasion was the dangling of a
red cotton night-cap over his head by one of the undergraduates, who was
in danger of a not ill-merited rebuke, but Browning interceded with the
Vice-Chancellor not to be too hard "on the harmless drolleries of the
young man." It was in this Oxford gown, holding in his hand "the square
old yellow book," that Robert Barrett Browning painted the portrait of his
father, which he presented to Oxford, and which now hangs, a treasured
possession, in Balliol Hall, to which portrait some allusion has already
been made.

[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF ROBERT BROWNING, BY HIS SON.

Painted in 1882, and presented to Oxford University by the artist.]

One of the most beautiful of the friendships of the last decade of the
poet's life was that with Mrs. Arthur Bronson, a very cultivated and
charming American woman who for more than twenty years made her home in
Venice. Casa Alvisi, on the Grand