son and his son's wife in the Palazzo Rezzonico, Venice, were
attractions not to be resisted, and in company with Miss Browning, he
reached the little hill-town that had grown so dear to him without
mishap and even without fatigue.

To the early days of July, shortly before his departure for Italy,
belong two incidents which may be placed side by side as exhibiting two
contrasted sides of Browning's character. On the 5th of that month he
dined with the Shah, who begged for the gift of one of his books. Next
day he chose a volume the binding of which might, as he says, "take the
imperial eye"; but the pleasure of the day was another gift, a gift to a
person who was not imperial. "I said to myself," he wrote to his young
friend the painter Lehmann's daughter, addressed in the letter as "My
beloved Alma"--"I said to myself 'Here do I present my poetry to a
personage for whom I do not care three straws; why should I not venture
to do as much for a young lady I love dearly, who, for the author's
sake, will not impossibly care rather for the inside than the outside of
the volume?' So I was bold enough to take one and offer it for your kind
acceptance, begging you to remember in days to come that the author,
whether a good poet or not, was always, my Alma, your affectionate
friend, Robert Browning." A gracious bowing of old age over the grace
and charm of youth! But the work of two days later, July 8th, was not
gracious. The lines "To Edward Fitzgerald," printed in _The Athenaeum_,
were dated on that day. It is stated by Mrs Orr that when they were
despatched to the journal in which they appeared, Browning regretted the
deed, though afterwards he found reasons to justify himself.
Fitzgerald's reference to Mrs Browning caused him a spasm of pain and
indignation, nor did the pain for long subside. The expression of his
indignation was outrageous in manner, and deficient in real power. He
had read a worse meaning into the unhappy words than had been intended,
and the writer was dead. Browning's act was like an involuntary muscular
contraction, which he could not control. The lines sprang far more from
love than from hate. "I felt as if she had died yesterday," he said. We
cannot regret that Browning was capable of such an offence; we can only
regret that what should have controlled his cry of pain and rage did not
operate at the right moment.

In Asolo, beside "the gate," Mrs Bronson had found and partly made what
Mr Henry James