BROWNING
DAYS WITH POETS
A Day with Browning
"The Palazzo Giustiniani Recanati was a place ofhistorical association and fifteenth-century traditions....At three o'clock regularly, a friend'sgondola, which was always at hand to convey him,came and carried him, usually, to the Lido,—hisfavourite spot."
Painting by E. W. Haslehust.
BROWNING'S HOUSE IN VENICE.
A DAY WITH THE POET BROWNING
NEW YORK
HODDER & STOUGHTON
In the same Series.
Longfellow.
Tennyson.
Keats.
Wordsworth.
Burns.
Scott.
Byron.
Shelley.
A DAY WITH BROWNING.
FROM his bed-room window in the Palazzo Giustiniani Recanati, everymorning in 1885, Robert Browning watched the sunrise. "My windowcommands a perfect view," he wrote, "the still, grey lagoon, the fewseagulls flying, the islet of San Giorgio in deep shadow, and theclouds in a long purple rack, from behind which a sort of spirit ofrose burns up, till presently all the rims are on fire with gold....So my day begins."
The Palazzo, in which a suite of rooms had been placed by Mrs. Bronsonat the disposal of the poet and his sister, was a place of historicalassociation and fifteenth-century traditions. And no more appropriateabiding-place than Venice could have been selected for a man ofBrowning's temperament. The Venetian colouring was a perpetual feastto his eye: its mediæval glories were a source of continualinspiration. And if much of his heart[Pg 6] still remained with his nativeland, so that the London daily papers were a necessity of existence,and a certain sense of exile occasionally obtruded itself, we mustneeds be grateful to that fact for its result in certain immortallines:
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent-spray's edge—<