"So, force is sorrow, and each sorrow, force: What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer Sluggish and safe! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse, Despair: but ever mid the whirling fear Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race!" CHAPTER VIII. THE LAST DECADE. Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiled. Since the catastrophe of 1861 Browning had not entered Italy. In the autumn of 1878 he once more bent his steps thither. Florence, indeed, he refused to revisit; it was burnt in upon his brain by memories intolerably dear. But in Venice the charm of Italy reasserted itself, and he returned during his remaining autumns with increasing frequency to the old-fashioned hostelry, Dell' Universo, on the Grand Canal, or latterly, to the second home provided by the hospitality of his gifted and congenial American friend, Mrs Arthur Bronson. Asolo, too, the town of Pippa, he saw again, after forty years' absence, with poignant feelings,--"such things have begun and ended with me in the interval!" But the poignancy of memory did not restore the magic of perception which had once been his. The mood described ten years later in the Prologue to _Asolando_ was already dominant: the iris glow of youth no longer glorified every common object of the natural world, but "a flower was just a flower." The glory still came by moments; some of his most thrilling outbursts of song belong to this time. But he built up no more great poems. He was approaching seventy, and it might well seem that if so prolific a versifier was not likely to become silent his poetry was rapidly resolving itself into wastes of theological argument, of grotesque posturing, or intellectualised anecdotage. The _Dramatic Idyls_ of 1879 and 1880 showed that these more serious forebodings were at least premature. There was little enough in them, no doubt, of the qualities traditionally connected with "idyll." Browning habitually wore his rue with a difference, and used familiar terms in senses of his own. There is nothing here of "enchanted reverie" or leisurely pastoralism. Browning's "idyls" are studies in life's moments of stress and strain, not in its secluded pleasances and verdurous wooded ways. It is for the most part some new variation of his familiar theme--the soul taken in the grip of a tragic crisis, and displaying its unsuspected deeps and voids. Not all are of this kind, however; and while his keenness for intense and abnormal effects is as pronounced as ever, he seeks them in an even more varied field. Italy, the main haunt of his song, yields--it can hardly be said to have inspired--one only of the _Idyls_--_Pietro of Abano_. Old memories of Russia are furbished up in _Iván Ivánovitch_, odd gatherings from the byways of England and America in _Ned Bratts,