In 1872 Mr. Browning had published a first series of selections from his works; it was to be followed by a second in 1880. In a preface to the earlier volume, he indicates the plan which he has followed in the choice and arrangement of poems; and some such intention runs also through the second; since he declined a suggestion made to him for the introduction or placing of a special poem, on the ground of its not conforming to the end he had in view. It is difficult, in the one case as in the other, to reconstruct the imagined personality to which his preface refers; and his words on the later occasion pointed rather to that idea of a chord of feeling which is raised by the correspondence of the first and last poems of the respective groups. But either clue may be followed with interest. Chapter 18 1878-1884 He revisits Italy; Asolo; Letters to Mrs. Fitz-Gerald--Venice--Favourite Alpine Retreats--Mrs. Arthur Bronson--Life in Venice--A Tragedy at Saint-Pierre--Mr. Cholmondeley--Mr. Browning's Patriotic Feeling; Extract from Letter to Mrs. Charles Skirrow--'Dramatic Idyls'--'Jocoseria'--'Ferishtah's Fancies'. The catastrophe of La Saisiaz closed a comprehensive chapter in Mr. Browning's habits and experience. It impelled him finally to break with the associations of the last seventeen autumns, which he remembered more in their tedious or painful circumstances than in the unexciting pleasure and renewed physical health which he had derived from them. He was weary of the ever-recurring effort to uproot himself from his home life, only to become stationary in some more or less uninteresting northern spot. The always latent desire for Italy sprang up in him, and with it the often present thought and wish to give his sister the opportunity of seeing it.