. 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 _Ivan Ivanovitch_,
odd gatherings from the byways of England and America in _Ned Bratts,
Halbert and Hob, Martin Relph_; and he takes from Virgil's hesitating
lips the hint of a joyous pagan adventure of the gods, and tells it with
his own brilliant plenitude and volubility. The mythic treatment of
nature had never appealed much to Browning, even as a gay decorative
device; he was presently to signalise his rejection of it in _Gerard de
Lairesse_, a superb example of what he rejected. In all mythology there
was something foreign to the tenacious humanity of his intellect; he was
most open to its appeal where it presented