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.  The mood described ten years later in the Prologue to Asolando was already dominant:  the iris glow of youth no longer glorified every common object of the natural world, but “a flower was just a flower.”  The glory still came by moments; some of his most thrilling outbursts of song belong to this time.  But he built up no more great poems.  He was approaching seventy, and it might well seem that if so prolific a versifier was not likely to become silent his poetry was rapidly resolving itself into wastes of theological argument, of grotesque posturing, or intellectualised anecdotage.  The Dramatic Idyls of 1879 and 1880 showed that these more serious forebodings were at least premature.  There was little enough in them, no doubt, of the qualities traditionally connected with “idyll.”  Browning habitually wore his rue with a difference, and used familiar terms in senses of his own.  There is nothing here of “enchanted reverie” or leisurely pastoralism.  Browning’s “idyls” are studies in life’s moments of stress and strain, not in its secluded pleasances and verdurous wooded ways.  It is for the most part some new variation of his familiar theme—­the soul taken in the grip of a tragic crisis, and displaying its unsuspected deeps and voids.  Not all are of this kind, however; and while his keenness for intense and abnormal effects is as pronounced as ever, he seeks them in an even more varied field.  Italy, the main haunt of his song, yields—­it can hardly be said to have inspired—­one only of the Idyls—­Pietro of Abano.  Old memories of Russia are furbished up in Ivan Ivanovitch, odd gatherings from the byways of England and America in Ned Bratts, Halbert and Hob, Martin Relph; and he takes from Virgil’s hesitating lips the hint of a joyous pagan adventure of the gods, and tells it with his own brilliant plenitude and volubility.  The mythic treatment of nature had never appealed much to Browning, even as a gay decorative device; he was presently to signalise his rejection of it in Gerard de Lairesse, a superb example of what he rejected.  In all mythology there was something foreign to the tenacious humanity of his intellect; he was most open to its appeal where it presented divinity stretching forth a helping hand to man.  The noble “idyl” of Echetlos is thus a counterpart, in its brief way, to the great tragic tale of Herakles and Alkestis.  Echetlos, the mysterious ploughman who shone amid the ranks at Marathon,

                           “clearing Greek earth of weed
      As he routed through the Sabian and rooted up the Mede,”