Browning in a letter to Lady Martin recalls the happy season in the Vale of Llangollen--"delightful weeks--each tipped with a sweet starry Sunday at the little church leading to the House Beautiful where we took our rest of an evening spent always memorably." [Illustration: THE PALAZZO GIUSTINIANI, VENICE. _From a drawing by_ Miss N. ERICHSEN.] Before passing on to Venice, where repose was mingled with excitement, Browning was accustomed to seek a renewal of physical energy, after the fatigues of London, in some place not too much haunted by the English tourist, where he could walk for hours in the clear mountain air. In 1881 and 1882 it was St Pierre de Chartreuse, from which he visited the Grande Chartreuse, and heard the midnight mass; in 1883 and 1885 it was Gressoney St Jean in the Val d'Aosta--the "delightful Gressoney" of the Prologue to _Ferishtah's Fancies_, where "eggs, milk, cheese, fruit" sufficed "for gormandizing"; in 1888 it was the yet more beautiful Primiero, near Feltre. In the previous year he had, for the second time, stayed at St Moritz. These were seasons of abounding life. St Pierre was only "a wild little clump of cottages on a mountain amid loftier mountains," with the roughest of little inns for its hotel; but its primitive arrangements suited Browning well and were bravely borne by his sister.[132] From Gressoney in September 1885 he wrote: "We are all but alone, the brief 'season' being over, and only a chance traveller turning up for a fortnight's lodging. We take our walks in the old way; two and a half hours before breakfast, three after it, in the most beautiful country I know. Yesterday the three hours passed without our meeting a single man, woman, or child; one man only was discovered at a distance at the foot of a mountain we had climbed."[133] All things pleased him; an August snowstorm at St Moritz was made amends for by "the magnificence of the mountain and its firs black against the universal white"; it served moreover as an illustration of a passage in the Iliad, the only book that accompanied him from England: "The days glide away uneventfully, _nearly_, and I breathe in the pleasant idleness at every pore. I have no few acquaintances here--nay, some old friends--but my intimates are the firs on the hillside, and the myriad butterflies all about it, every bright wing of them under the snow to-day, which ought not to have been for a fortnight yet."[134] And from Primiero in 1888, when his strength had considerably declined, a letter tells of unabated pleasure; of mountains "which morning and evening, in turn, transmute literally to gold," with at times a silver change; of the valley "one green luxuriance"; of the tiger-lilies in the garden above ten feet high, every bloom and every leaf faultless; and of the captive fox, "most engaging of little vixens," who, to Browning's great joy, broke her chain and escaped.[135] As each successive volume