on the lawn.  He himself writes in one of his quaint and poetic phrases that he had come to love these long country retreats, “another term of delightful weeks, each tipped with a sweet starry Sunday at the little church.”  For the first time, and in the last two or three years, he was really growing old.  On one point he maintained always a tranquil and unvarying decision.  The pessimistic school of poetry was growing up all round him; the decadents, with their belief that art was only a counting of the autumn leaves, were approaching more and more towards their tired triumph and their tasteless popularity.  But Browning would not for one instant take the scorn of them out of his voice.  “Death, death, it is this harping on death that I despise so much.  In fiction, in poetry, French as well as English, and I am told in American also, in art and literature, the shadow of death, call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference, is upon us.  But what fools who talk thus!  Why, amico mio, you know as well as I, that death is life, just as our daily momentarily dying body is none the less alive, and ever recruiting new forces of existence.  Without death, which is our church-yardy crape-like word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life.  Never say of me that I am dead.”

On August 13, 1888, he set out once more for Italy, the last of his innumerable voyages.  During his last Italian period he seems to have fallen back on very ultimate simplicities, chiefly a mere staring at nature.  The family with whom he lived kept a fox cub, and Browning would spend hours with it watching its grotesque ways; when it escaped, he was characteristically enough delighted.  The old man could be seen continually in the lanes round Asolo, peering into hedges and whistling for the lizards.

This serene and pastoral decline, surely the mildest of slopes into death, was suddenly diversified by a flash of something lying far below.  Browning’s eye fell upon a passage written by the distinguished Edward Fitzgerald, who had been dead for many years, in which Fitzgerald spoke in an uncomplimentary manner of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.  Browning immediately wrote the “Lines to Edward Fitzgerald,” and set the whole literary world in an uproar.  The lines were bitter and excessive to have been written against any man, especially bitter and excessive to have been written against a man who was not alive to reply.  And yet, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel a certain dark and indescribable pleasure in this last burst of the old barbaric energy.  The mountain had been tilled and forested, and laid out in gardens to the summit; but for one last night it had proved itself once more a volcano, and had lit up all the plains with its forgotten fire.  And the blow, savage as it was, was dealt for that great central sanctity—­the story of a man’s youth.  All that the old man would say in reply to every view of the question was, “I felt as if she had died yesterday.”