ealth 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, so,
bless you and good-bye in the truest sense, dear one!

Ever Your Affectionately

ROBERT BROWNING.

The "new volume in type" to which he referred was his collection entitled
"Asolando," all of which, with the exception of one poem, had been written
within the last two years of his life.

Mr. Barrett Browning relates that while his father was reading aloud these
last proofs to himself and his wife, the poet paused over the "Epilogue,"
at the stanza--

"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake."

and remarked: "It almost seems like praising myself to say this, and yet
it is true, the simple truth, and so I shall not cancel it."

November, often lovely in Venice, was singularly summer-like that year. On
one day Mr. Browning found the heat on the Lido "scarcely endurable,"
indeed, but "snow-tipped Alps" revealed themselves in the distance,
offeri