of the
tongue in lusciousness, curbed by piquancy, gained at the expense of a
dozen other birds! At three o'clock came the gondola, and it was often
directed to the Lido. "I walk, even in wind and rain, for a couple of
hours on Lido," Browning wrote when nearly seventy, "and enjoy the break
of sea on the strip of sand as much as Shelley did in those old
days."[137] And to another friend: "You don't know how absolutely well I
am after my walking, not on the mountains merely, but on the beloved
Lido. Go there, if only to stand and be blown about by the sea
wind."[138] At one time he even talked of completing an unfinished villa
on the Lido from which "the divine sunsets" could be seen, but the
dream-villa faded after the manner of such dreams. Sunsets, however, and
sunrises never faded from Browning's brain. "I will not praise a cloud
however bright," says Wordsworth, although no one has praised them more
ardently than he. From Pippa's sunrise to the sunrises of mornings when
his life drew towards its close, Browning lavished his praise upon the
scenery of the sky. A passage quoted by Mrs Orr from a letter written a
little more than a year before his death is steeped in colour; when
_Pippa Passes_ becomes the prey of the annotating editor it will
illuminate his page: "Every morning at six I see the sun rise.... My
bedroom window commands a perfect view: the still, grey lagune, the few
sea-gulls flying, the islet of S. Giorgio in deep shadow, and the clouds
in a long purple rack, behind which a sort of spirit of rose burns up
till presently all the rims are on fire with gold, and last of all the
orb sends before it a long column of its own essence apparently: so my
day begins." The sea-gulls of which this extract speaks were, Mrs
Bronson tells us, a special delight to Browning. On a day of gales "he
would stand at the window and watch them as they sailed to and fro, a
sure sign of heavy storms in the Adriatic." To him, as he declared, they
were even more interesting than the doves of St Mark.

Sometimes his walks, guided by Mrs Bronson's daughter, "the best
cicerone in the world," he said, were through the narrowest by-streets
of the city, where he rejoiced in the discovery, or what he supposed to
be discovery, of some neglected stone of Venice. Occasionally he
examined curiously the monuments of the churches. His American friend
tells at length the story of a search in the Church of San Niccolo for
the tomb of the chieft