in his memory, he added to his Russian tale
the highly unidyllic "idyl" of English life, _Ned Bratts_. It was thus
that subjects for poems suddenly presented themselves to Browning, often
rising up as it were spontaneously out of the remote past. "There comes
up unexpectedly," he wrote in a letter to a friend, "some subject for
poetry, which has been dormant, and apparently dead, for perhaps dozens
of years. A month since I wrote a poem of some two hundred lines
['Donald'] about a story I heard more than forty years ago, and never
dreamed of trying to repeat, wondering how it had so long escaped me;
and so it has been with my best things."[127] Before the close of
September the travellers were in a rough but pleasant albergo at Asolo,
which Browning had not seen since his first Italian journey more than
forty years previously. "Such things," he writes, "have begun and ended
with me in the interval!" Changes had taken place in the little city;
yet much seemed familiar and therefore the more dreamlike. The place had
indeed haunted him in his dreams; he would find himself travelling with
a friend, or some mysterious stranger, when suddenly the little town
sparkling in the sunshine would rise before him. "Look! look there is
Asolo," he would cry, "do let us go there!" And always, after the way of
dreams, his companions would declare it impossible and he would be
hurried away.[128] From the time that he actually saw again the city
that he loved this recurring dream was to come no more. He wandered
through the well-known places, and seeking for an echo in the Rocca, the
ruined fortress above the town, he found that it had not lost its
tongue. A fortnight at Venice in a hotel where quiet and coolness were
the chief attractions, prepared the way for many subsequent visits to
what he afterwards called "the dearest place in the world." Everything
in Venice, says Mrs Bronson, charmed him: "He found grace and beauty in
the _popolo_ whom he paints so well in the Goldoni sonnet. The poorest
street children were pretty in his eyes. He would admire a carpenter or
a painter, who chanced to be at work in the house, and say to me 'See
the fine poise of the head ... those well-cut features. You might fancy
that man in the crimson robe of a Senator as you see them in Tintoret's
canvas.'"

But these are reminiscences of later days. It was in 1880 that Browning
made the acquaintance of his American friend Mrs Arthur Bronson, whose
kind hospit