Browning's Works,I owe it to him to say --what I believe is only known to his sister and myself --that there was a moment in which he regretted those lines,and would willingly have withdrawn them.
This was the period,unfortunately short,which intervened between his sending them to the 'Athenaeum',and their appearance there.
When once public opinion had expressed itself upon them in its too extreme forms of sympathy and condemnation,the pugnacity of his mind found support in both,and regret was silenced if not destroyed.In so far as his published words remained open to censure,I may also,without indelicacy,urge one more plea in his behalf.
That which to the merely sympathetic observer appeared a subject for disapprobation,perhaps disgust,had affected him with the directness of a sharp physical blow.He spoke of it,and for hours,even days,was known to feel it,as such.
The events of that distant past,which he had lived down,though never forgotten,had flashed upon him from the words which so unexpectedly met his eye,in a vividness of remembrance which was reality.'I felt as if she had died yesterday,'
he said some days later to a friend,in half deprecation,half denial,of the too great fierceness of his reaction.He only recovered his balance in striking the counter-blow.That he could be thus affected at an age usually destructive of the more violent emotions,is part of the mystery of those closing days which had already overtaken him.
By the first of November he was in Venice with his son and daughter;and during the three following weeks was apparently well,though a physician whom he met at a dinner party,and to whom he had half jokingly given his pulse to feel,had learned from it that his days were numbered.He wrote to Miss Keep on the 9th of the month:
'...Mrs.Bronson has bought a house at Asolo,and beautified it indeed,--niched as it is in an old tower of the fortifications still partly surrounding the city (for a city it is),and eighteen towers,more or less ruinous,are still discoverable there:
it is indeed a delightful place.Meantime,to go on,--we came here,and had a pleasant welcome from our hosts --who are truly magnificently lodged in this vast palazzo which my son has really shown himself fit to possess,so surprising are his restorations and improvements:the whole is all but complete,decorated,--that is,renewed admirably in all respects.
'What strikes me as most noteworthy is the cheerfulness and comfort of the huge rooms.
'The building is warmed throughout by a furnace and pipes.
'Yesterday,on the Lido,the heat was hardly endurable:bright sunshine,blue sky,--snow-tipped Alps in the distance.
No place,I think,ever suited my needs,bodily and intellectual,so well.
'The first are satisfied --I am QUITE well,every breathing inconvenience gone:and as for the latter,I got through whatever had given me trouble in London....'
But it was winter,even in Venice,and one day began with an actual fog.
He insisted,notwithstanding,on taking his usual walk on the Lido.
He caught a bronchial cold of which the symptoms were aggravated not only by the asthmatic tendency,but by what proved to be exhaustion of the heart;and believing as usual that his liver alone was at fault,he took little food,and refused wine altogether.
He did not yield to the sense of illness;he did not keep his bed.
Some feverish energy must have supported him through this avoidance of every measure which might have afforded even temporary strength or relief.On Friday,the 29th,he wrote to a friend in London that he had waited thus long for the final answer from Asolo,but would wait no longer.
He would start for England,if possible,on the Wednesday or Thursday of the following week.It was true 'he had caught a cold;he felt sadly asthmatic,scarcely fit to travel;but he hoped for the best,and would write again soon.'He wrote again the following day,declaring himself better.He had been punished,he said,for long-standing neglect of his 'provoking liver';but a simple medicine,which he had often taken before,had this time also relieved the oppression of his chest;his friend was not to be uneasy about him;'it was in his nature to get into scrapes of this kind,but he always managed,somehow or other,to extricate himself from them.'
He concluded with fresh details of his hopes and plans.
In the ensuing night the bronchial distress increased;and in the morning he consented to see his son's physician,Dr.Cini,whose investigation of the case at once revealed to him its seriousness.
The patient had been removed two days before,from the second storey of the house,which the family then inhabited,to an entresol apartment just above the ground-floor,from which he could pass into the dining-room without fatigue.Its lower ceilings gave him (erroneously)an impression of greater warmth,and he had imagined himself benefited by the change.
A freer circulation of air was now considered imperative,and he was carried to Mrs.Browning's spacious bedroom,where an open fireplace supplied both warmth and ventilation,and large windows admitted all the sunshine of the Grand Canal.
Everything was done for him which professional skill and loving care could do.
Mrs.Browning,assisted by her husband,and by a young lady who was then her guest,filled the place of the trained nurses until these could arrive;for a few days the impending calamity seemed even to have been averted.The bronchial attack was overcome.
Mr.Browning had once walked from the bed to the sofa;his sister,whose anxiety had perhaps been spared the full knowledge of his state,could send comforting reports to his friends at home.But the enfeebled heart had made its last effort.Attacks of faintness set in.
