Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol I (1901).djvu/377

 For the summer and autumn of 1877 the friends took a house at the foot of La Saleve, in Savoy, just above Geneva; it was called La Saisiaz; here Browning sat, as he said, 'aerially, like Euripides, and saw the clouds come and go.' He was not, however, in anything like his usual spirits, and he suffered a terrible shock early in September by the sudden death of Miss Egerton-Smith. The present writer recollects the extraordinary change which appeared to have passed over the poet when he reappeared in London, nor will easily forget the tumult of emotion with which he spoke of the shock of his friend's dying, almost at his feet. He put his reflections on the subject into the strange and noble poem of 'La Saisiaz,' which he finished in November 1877. He lightened the gloom of what was practically a monody on Miss Egerton-Smith by contrasting it with one of the liveliest of his French studies, 'The Two Poets of Croisic,' which he completed in January 1878. These two works, the one so solemn, the other so sunny, were published in a single volume in the spring of 1878.

In August 1878 he revisited Italy for the first time since 1861. He stayed some time at the Splügen, and here he wrote 'Ivàn Ivànovitch.' Late in September his sister and he passed on to Asolo, which, for the moment, failed to reawaken his old pleasure; and in October they went on to Venice, where they stayed in the Palazzo Brandolin-Rota. This was a comparatively short visit to Italy, but it awakened all Browning's old enthusiasm, and for the remainder of his life he went to Italy as often and for as long a time as he could contrive to. During this autumn, and while in the south, he wrote the greater part of the 'Dramatic Idyls,' published early in 1879. His fame was now universal, and he enjoyed for the first time full recognition as one of the two sovereign poets of the age. 'Tennyson and I seem now to be regarded as the two kings of Brentford,' he laughingly said in the course of this year. His sister and he returned to Venice, and to their former quarters, in the autumn of 1879 and again in that of 1880. In the latter year he published a second series of 'Dramatic Idyls,' including 'Olive,' which he was accustomed to mention as perhaps the best of all his idyllic poems 'in the Greek sense.'

In the summer of 1881 Dr. Furnivall and Miss E. H. Hickey started the 'Browning Society' for the interpretation and illustration of his writings. He received the intimation of their project with divided feelings; he could not but be gratified at the enthusiasm shown for his work after long neglect, and yet he was apprehensive of ridicule. He did not refuse to permit it, but he declined most positively to co-operate in it. He persisted, when talking of it to old friends, in treating it as a joke, and he remained to the last a little nervous about being identified with it. It involved, indeed, a position of great danger to a living writer, but, on the whole, the action of the society on the fame and general popularity of the poet was distinctly advantageous; and so much worship was agreeable to a man who had passed middle life without the due average of recognition. He became, about the same time, president of the New Shakspere Society.

The autumn of 1881 was the last which the Brownings spent at the Palazzo Brandolin-Rota. On their way to it they stopped for six weeks at Saint-Pierre-la-Chartreuse, close to the monastery, where the poet lodged three days, 'staying there through the night in order to hear the midnight mass.' This autumn, in spite of 'abominable and un-Venetian' weather, was greatly appreciated. 'I walk, even in wind and rain, for a couple of hours on Lido, and enjoy the break of sea on the strip of sand as much as Shelley did in those old days' (11 Oct. 1881). Browning had now reached his seventieth year, and, for the first time, the flow of his poetic invention seemed to flag a little. He did not write much from 1879 to 1883. In 1882 the Brownings proceeded again to Saint-Pierre-la-Chartreuse for the summer, intending to go on to Venice; but at Verona they learned that the Palazzo Brandolin-Rota had been transformed into a museum, and, while they hesitated whither they should turn, the floods of the Po cut them off from Venice. This autumn, therefore, they made Verona their headquarters; and here Browning wrote several of the poems which appeared early in 1883, under the Batavian-Latin title 'Jocoseria.'

In 1883 the Brownings spent the summer opposite Monte Rosa, at Gressoney St.-Jean, a place to which the poet became more attached than to any other Alpine station ; later on they passed to Venice, where their excellent friend, Mrs. Arthur Bronson (she died on 6 Feb. 1901), received them as her guests in the Palazzo Giustiniani Recanati. Here Browning wrote the sonnets 'Sighed Rawdon Brown' and 'Goldoni.' In these later years, his bodily endurance having steadily declined, Browning saw fewer and fewer people during his long Venetian sojourns, depending mainly outside the salon of Mrs. Bronson on 'the kindness of Sir