nt many hours walking up and down
or reading, or he would sit in the arm-chair and "drink in the air," as
he used to say.

From that point of vantage he would watch Nature's ever-varying moods,
and muse over the historical recollections evoked by Caterina Cornaro's
palace and the other old buildings on the hills opposite. Often he would
hurry back to the house, anxious lest he should miss the sunset as
viewed from that loggia.

A constant source of enjoyment to him was an old spinet, marked and
dated, "Ferdinando Ferrari, Ravenna, 1522." Knowing how much pleasure
this little instrument had given him during former stays at her house in
Venice, his hostess had had it brought to Asolo, and, here as there, he
delighted in playing upon it of an evening, simple, restful melodies
that had been familiar to him for years, or quaint scraps of early
German or Italian music.

From the spinet he would go to the books. "What have you got?" he asked
on the first evening of his stay. "What shall I read to you?
Shakespeare? What! You don't mean to say you haven't brought your
Shakespeare! I am shocked."

On this, as on other occasions, he was always most deprecatory when
asked to read something of his own. But the new edition of his works
which he had presented to his friend, being at hand, he would take down
a volume and relate, in his own words, and with his unaffected
intonation, the story of a Paracelsus or a Strafford. And that would
afterwards lead him to speak with ever fresh enthusiasm of the
historical associations connected with such names. In the course of the
exhaustive studies that always preceded the composition of any work of
his, he made himself intimately acquainted with every fact concerning
the lives of those whom he was about to pourtray. Whatever detail
history had preserved he made his own, and what his mind had once
assimilated, his memory ever retained.

The pilgrim to Asolo would naturally look about for some clue to the
poems written there. He would hope to meet with some of the models,
animate or inanimate, that might have suggested one or the other of the
"Facts and Fancies." But, reticent as Browning always was concerning his
work, even with those nearest to him, he has left no trace to guide us.

It was quite exceptional when, one day returning from a drive, he said,
"I've composed a poem since we've been out; it is all in my head, and
when I get home I will write it down."

"What is it about?" ver