al, where a good Christian Herakles, Pope Sixtus of Rome,
makes common cause with his spiritual children in their humble pleasures
of the senses. And in contrast with this poem of the religion of joy is
the story of another ruler of Rome, the too fortunate Emperor Augustus,
who, in the shadow of the religion of fear and sorrow, must propitiate
the envy of Fate by turning beggar once a year. A shivering thrill runs
through us as we catch a sight of the supreme mendicant's "sparkling
eyes beneath their eyebrows' ridge":

"He's God!" shouts Lucius Varus Rufus: "Man
And worms'-meat any moment!" mutters low
Some Power, admonishing the mortal-born.

There were nobler sides of Paganism than this with which Browning seems
never to have had an adequate sympathy. And yet the religion even of
Marcus Aurelius lacked something of the joy of the religion of the
thankful Pope who feasted upon beans.[144]

In the winter which followed his change of abode from Warwick Crescent
to the more commodious house in De Vere Gardens, the winter of
1887-1888, Browning's health and strength visibly declined; a succession
of exhausting colds lowered his vitality; yet he maintained his habitual
ways of life, and would not yield. In August 1888 he started ill for his
Italian holiday, and travelled with difficulty and distress. But the
rest among the mountains at Primiero restored him. At Venice he seemed
as vigorous as he was joyous. And when he returned to London in February
1889 the improvement in his strength was in a considerable measure
maintained. Yet it was evident that the physical vigour which had
seemed invincible was on the ebb. In the early summer he paid the last
of those visits, which he so highly valued, to Balliol College, Oxford.
The opening week of June found him at Cambridge. Mr Gosse has told how
on the first Sunday of that month Browning and he sat together "in a
sequestered part of the beautiful Fellows' Garden of Trinity," under a
cloudless sky, amid the early foliage with double hawthorns in bloom,
and how the old man, in a mood of serenity and without his usual
gesticulation, talked of his own early life and aspirations. He shrank
that summer, says Mrs Orr, from the fatigue of a journey to Italy and
thought of Scotland as a place of rest. But unfavourable weather in
early August forbade the execution of the plan. An invitation from Mrs
Bronson to her house at Asolo, to be followed by the pleasure of seeing
his