he calls up Bernard
Mandeville to confute the formidable pessimism of his old friend
Carlyle--"whose groan I hear, with guffaw at the end disposing of
mock--melancholy." Gerard de Lairesse, whose rococo landscapes had
interested him as a boy, he introduces only to typify an outworn way of
art--the mythic treatment of nature; but he illustrates this "inferior"
way with a splendour of poetry that makes his ironic exposure
dangerously like an unwitting vindication. These visions of Prometheus
on the storm-swept crag, of Artemis hunting in the dawn, show that
Browning was master, if he had cared to use it, of that magnificent
symbolic speech elicited from Greek myth in the _Hyperion_ or the
_Prometheus Unbound_. But it was a foreign idiom to him, and his
occasional use of it a _tour de force_.

Two years only now remained for Browning, and it began to be apparent to
his friends that his sturdy health was no longer secure. His way of life
underwent no change, he was as active in society as ever, and
acquaintances, old and new, still claimed his time, and added to the
burden, always cheerfully endured, of his correspondence. In October
1887 the marriage of his son attached him by a new tie to Italy, and the
Palazzo Rezzonico on the Grand Canal, where "Pen" and his young American
wife presently settled, was to be his last, as it was his most
magnificent, abode. To Venice he turned his steps each autumn of these
last two years; lingering by the way among the mountains or in the
beautiful border region at their feet. It was thus that, in the early
autumn of 1889, he came yet once again to Asolo. His old friend and
hostess, Mrs Arthur Bronson, had discovered a pleasant, airy abode on
the old town-wall, overhanging a ravine, and Asolo, seen from this
"castle precipice-encurled," recovered all its old magic. It was here
that he put together the disconnected pieces, many written during the
last two years in London, others at Asolo itself, which were finally
published on the day of his death. The Tower of Queen Cornaro still
overlooked the little town, as it had done half a century before; and he
attached these last poems to the same tradition by giving them the
pleasant title said to have been invented by her secretary.
_Asolando_--_Facts and Fancies_, both titles contain a hint of the
ageing Browning,--the relaxed physical energy which allows this
strenuous waker to dream (_Reverie; Bad Dreams_); the flagging poetic
power, whose