, combined with
the scenery of plain and mountain, were such as to rouse the poet to the
greatest enthusiasm. Heedless of cold or damp, forgetting himself
completely, though warmly wrapped to please others, he would gaze on the
changing aspects of earth and sky until darkness covered everything from
his sight."

When in the evenings Browning read aloud he did not, like Tennyson, as
described by Mr Rossetti, allow his voice to "sway onward with a
long-drawn chaunt" which gave "noble value and emphasis to the metrical
structure and pauses." His delivery was full and distinctive, but it
"took much less account than Tennyson's of the poem as a rhythmical
whole; his delivery had more affinity to that of an actor, laying stress
on all the light and shade of the composition--its touches of character,
the conversational points, its dramatic give-and-take. In those
qualities of elocution in which Tennyson was strong, and aimed to be
strong, Browning was contentedly weak; and _vice versa_."[146]
Sometimes, like another great poet, Pope, he was deeply affected by the
passion of beauty or heroism or pathos in what he read, and could not
control his feelings. Mrs Orr mentions that in reading aloud his
translation of the _Herakles_, he, like Pope in reading a passage of his
_Iliad_, was moved to tears. Dr Furnivall tells of the mounting
excitement with which he once delivered in the writer's hearing his
_Ixion_. When at La Mura after his dreamy playing, on a spinet of 1522,
old airs, melodious, melancholy airs, Browning would propose to read
aloud, it was not his own poetry that he most willingly chose. "No R.B.
to-night," he would say; "then with a smile, 'Let us have some real
poetry'"; and the volume would be one by Shelley or Keats, or Coleridge
or Tennyson. It was as a punishment to his hostess for the crime of
having no Shakespeare on her shelves that he threatened her with one of
his "toughest poems"; but the tough poem, interpreted by his emphasis
and pauses, became "as clear and comprehensible as one could possibly
desire." In his talk at Asolo "he seemed purposely to avoid deep and
serious topics. If such were broached in his presence he dismissed them
with one strong, convincing sentence, and adroitly turned the current of
conversation into a shallower channel."

A project which came very near his heart was that of purchasing from the
municipal authorities a small piece of ground, divided from La Mura by a
ravine clothed