CHAPTER VIII.
THE LAST DECADE.
Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiled.
Since the catastrophe of 1861 Browning had not entered Italy.

In the autumn of 1878 he once more bent his steps thither.

Florence, indeed, he refused to revisit; it was burnt in upon his brain by memories intolerably dear.

But in Venice the charm of Italy reasserted itself, and he returned during his remaining autumns with increasing frequency to the old-fashioned hostelry, Dell' Universo, on the Grand Canal, or latterly, to the second home provided by the hospitality of his gifted and congenial American friend, Mrs Arthur Bronson.

Asolo, too, the town of Pippa, he saw again, after forty years' absence, with poignant feelings,--"such things have begun and ended with me in the interval!" But the poignancy of memory did not restore the magic of perception which had once been his.