For me,I never had another feeling than entire admiration for your music --entire admiration --I put it apart from all other English music I know,and fully believe in it as THE music we all waited for.
Of your health I shall not trust myself to speak:you must know what is unspoken.I should have been most happy to see you if but for a minute --and if next Wednesday,I might take your hand for a moment.--But you would concede that,if it were right,remembering what is now very old friendship.
May God bless you for ever (The signature has been cut off.)
In the autumn of 1844Mr.Browning set forth for Italy,taking ship,it is believed,direct to Naples.Here he made the acquaintance of a young Neapolitan gentleman who had spent most of his life in Paris;and they became such good friends that they proceeded to Rome together.
Mr.Scotti was an invaluable travelling companion,for he engaged their conveyance,and did all such bargaining in their joint interest as the habits of his country required.'As I write,'Mr.Browning said in a letter to his sister,'I hear him disputing our bill in the next room.
He does not see why we should pay for six wax candles when we have used only two.'At Rome they spent most of their evenings with an old acquaintance of Mr.Browning's,then Countess Carducci,and she pronounced Mr.Scotti the handsomest man she had ever seen.
He certainly bore no appearance of being the least prosperous.
But he blew out his brains soon after he and his new friend had parted;and I do not think the act was ever fully accounted for.
It must have been on his return journey that Mr.Browning went to Leghorn to see Edward John Trelawney,to whom he carried a letter of introduction.
He described the interview long afterwards to Mr.Val Prinsep,but chiefly in his impressions of the cool courage which Mr.Trelawney had displayed during its course.A surgeon was occupied all the time in probing his leg for a bullet which had been lodged there some years before,and had lately made itself fe
<and he showed himself absolutely indifferent to the pain of the operation.Mr.Browning's main object in paying the visit had been,naturally,to speak with one who had known Byron and been the last to see Shelley alive;but we only hear of the two poets that they formed in part the subject of their conversation.
He reached England,again,we suppose,through Germany --since he avoided Paris as before.
It has been asserted by persons otherwise well informed,that on this,if not on his previous Italian journey,Mr.Browning became acquainted with Stendhal,then French Consul at Civita Vecchia,and that he imbibed from the great novelist a taste for curiosities of Italian family history,which ultimately led him in the direction of the Franceschini case.
It is certain that he profoundly admired this writer,and if he was not,at some time or other,introduced to him it was because the opportunity did not occur.But there is abundant evidence that no introduction took place,and quite sufficient proof that none was possible.Stendhal died in Paris in March 1842;and granting that he was at Civita Vecchia when the poet made his earlier voyage --no certainty even while he held the appointment --the ship cannot have touched there on its way to Trieste.
It is also a mistake to suppose that Mr.Browning was specially interested in ancient chronicles,as such.This was one of the points on which he distinctly differed from his father.He took his dramatic subjects wherever he found them,and any historical research which they ultimately involved was undertaken for purposes of verification.
'Sordello'alone may have been conceived on a rather different plan,and I have no authority whatever for admitting that it was so.
The discovery of the record of the Franceschini case was,as its author has everywhere declared,an accident.
A single relic exists for us of this visit to the South --a shell picked up,according to its inion,on one of the Syren Isles,October 4,1844;but many of its reminiscences are embodied in that vivid and charming picture 'The Englishman in Italy',which appeared in the 'Bells and Pomegranates'number for the following year.
Naples always remained a bright spot in the poet's memory;and if it had been,like Asolo,his first experience of Italy,it must have drawn him in later years the more powerfully of the two.
At one period,indeed,he dreamed of it as a home for his declining days.
