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 chieftain Salinguerra of Browning’s own Sordello.  At times he entered the bric-a-brac shops, and made a purchase of some piece of old furniture or tapestry.  His rule “never to buy anything without knowing exactly what he wished to do with it” must have been interpreted liberally, for when about to move in June 1887 from Warwick Crescent to De Vere Gardens many treasures acquired in Italy were, Mrs Orr tells us, stowed away in the house which he was on the point of leaving.  And the latest bibelot was always the most enchanting:  “Like a child with a new toy,” says Mrs Bronson, “he would carry it himself (size and weight permitting) into the gondola, rejoice over his chance in finding it, and descant eloquently upon its intrinsic merits.”  Thus, or with his son’s assistance, came to De Vere Gardens brass lamps that had hung in Venetian chapels, the silver Jewish “Sabbath lamp,” and the “four little heads”—­the seasons—­after which, Browning declared, he would not buy another thing for the house.[139] Returning from his walks on the Lido or wanderings through the little calli, he showed that unwise half-disdain, which an unenlightened masculine Herakles might have shown, for the blessedness of five o’clock tea.  At dinner he was in his toilet what Mr Henry