[Illustration:  THE PALAZZO REZZONICO, VENICE.

From a drawing by Miss KATHERINE KIMBALL.]

For a time during this last visit to Asolo Browning suffered some inconvenience from shortness of breath in climbing hills, but the discomfort passed away.  He looked forward to an early return to England, spoke with pleasant anticipation of the soft-pedal piano which his kind friend Mrs Bronson desired to procure at Boston and place in his study in De Vere Gardens, and he dreamed of future poetical achievements.  “Shall I whisper to you my ambition and my hope?” he asked his hostess.  “It is to write a tragedy better than anything I have done yet.  I think of it constantly.”  With the end of October the happy days at Asolo were at an end.  On the first of November he was in Venice, “magnificently lodged,” he says, “in this vast palazzo, which my son has really shown himself fit to possess, so surprising are his restorations and improvements.”  At Asolo he had parted from his American friend Story with the words, “More than forty years of friendship and never a break.”  In Venice he met an American friend of more recent years, Professor Corson, who describes him as stepping briskly, with a look that went everywhere, and as cheerfully anticipating many more years of productive work.[147] Yet in truth the end was near.  Dining with Mr and Mrs Curtis, where he read aloud some poems of his forthcoming volume, he met a London physician, Dr Bird.  Next evening Dr Bird again dined with Browning, who expressed confident satisfaction as to his state of health, and held out his wrist that his words might be confirmed by the regularity and vigour of his pulse.  The physician became at once aware that Browning’s confidence was far from receiving the warrant in which he believed.  Still he maintained his customary two hours’ walk each day.  Towards the close of November, on a day of fog, he returned from the Lido with symptoms of a bronchial cold.  He dealt with the trouble as he was accustomed, and did not take to his bed.  Though feeling scarcely fit to travel he planned his departure for England after the lapse of four or five days.  On December 1st, an Italian physician was summoned, and immediately perceived the gravity of the case.  Within a few days the bronchial trouble was subdued, but failure of the heart was apparent.  Some hours before the end he said to one of his nurses, “I feel much worse.  I know now that I must die.”  The ebbing away of life was painless.  As the clocks of Venice were striking ten on the night of Thursday, December 12, 1889, Browning died.[148]

He had never concerned himself much about his place of burial.  A lifeless body seemed to him only an old vesture that had been cast aside.  “He had said to his sister in the foregoing summer,” Mrs Orr tells us, “that he wished to be buried wherever he might die; if in England, with his mother; if in France, with his father; if in Italy, with his wife.”  The English cemetery in Florence