e! I never
supposed that photographers would have the good sense to use their art
on so many out-of-the-way scenes and sights, just those I love
most....

You--you have lost Lowell, and Field, and the rest of the good
fellowship, but you will be sure of a succession of the sort.

On the poet's seventieth birthday he received, from the Browning Societies
of Oxford, Cambridge, Cornell University, and others, a gift of a
complete set of his own works, bound in olive green morocco, in a
beautifully carved oak case, with this inscription:

"To Robert Browning on his seventieth birthday, May 7th, 1882, from
some members of the Browning Societies. These members having
ascertained that the works of a Great Modern Poet are never in Robert
Browning's house, beg him to accept a set of these works which they
assure him will be found worthy of his most serious attention."

Dr. Corson has related that when he visited the poet at one time Browning
showed him this case, placed against the wall of the drawing-room, with an
almost boyish delight.

In August of 1882, on their leisurely way to Venice, Browning and his
sister lingered at Saint-Pierre la Chartreuse and at Gressoney Saint-Jean,
where his enchanting outlook upon Monte Rosa was a continual joy, Mr.
Browning spent one night in the monastery of the Grand Chartreuse, in
order to hear the midnight mass; while Miss Browning, denied hospitality
in the monastery, received that of the convent near at hand, where she was
cordially entertained by the Mother Superior.

The Prologue of "Ferishtah's Fancies," published the next year, is dated
from Gressoney, Val d'Aosta, and the lines,

"A fancy-freak by contrast born of thee,
Delightful Gressoney!"

will recall themselves to the memory. Miss Browning was an ideal companion
in these mountain wanderings. She was equal to endless walks, and she had
the accomplishment of being able to ride a mule or a donkey as one to the
manor born. From Gressoney they looked up to the glaciers of Monte Rosa,
almost overhanging, and from Saint-Pierre Browning wrote to a friend that
they were in the roughest and most primitive inn, "but my sister bears it
bravely."

Italian recognition of Browning was stimulated and extended, if not
primarily inspired, by Il Signor Dottore Nancioni, who had the Chair of
Literature in the University of Florence, and whom the Brownings had first
met in the old Siena d