lauded.[20] After the fifth
performance the wretched Pym refused to save his mother England even
once more, and the play was withdrawn. Browning declared to his friends
that never again, as long as he might live, would he write a play.
Whining not being to his taste, he averted his eyes and set himself
resolutely to work upon _Sordello_.

"I sail this morning for Venice," Browning wrote to a friend on Good
Friday, 1838. He voyaged as sole passenger on a merchantman, and soon
was on friendliest terms with the rough kindly captain. For the first
fortnight the sea was stormy and Browning suffered much; as they passed
through the Straits of Gibraltar, Captain Davidson aided him to reach
the deck, and a pulsing of home-pride--not home-sickness--gave their
origin to the patriotic lines beginning, "Nobly, nobly Cape Saint
Vincent to the north-west died away." Under the bulwark of the _Norham
Castle_, off the African coast, when the fancy of a gallop on his Uncle
Reuben's horse suddenly presented itself in pleasant contrast with the
tedium of the hours on shipboard, he wrote in pencil, on the flyleaf of
Bartoli's Simboli, that most spirited of poems which tell of the glory
of motion--_How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix_. The only
adventure of the voyage was the discovery of an Algerine pirate ship
floating keel uppermost; it righted suddenly under the stress of ropes
from the _Norham Castle_, and the ghastly and intolerable
dead--Algerines and Spaniards--could not scare the British sailors eager
for loot; at last the battered hulk was cast loose, and its blackness
was seen reeling slowly off "into the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in
the world." Having visited Venice, Vicenza and Padua--cities and
mountain solitudes, which gave their warmth and colour to his unfinished
poem--Browning returned home by way of Tyrol, the Rhine, Liege and
Antwerp. It was his first visit to Italy and was a time of enchantment.
Fifty years later he recalled the memories of these early days when his
delight had something insubstantial, magical in it, and the vision was
half perceived with the eye and half projected from within:--

How many a year my Asolo,
Since--one step just from sea to land--
I found you, loved yet feared you so--
For natural objects seemed to stand
Palpably fire-clothed![21]

Of evenings soon after his return to London Mrs Bridell-Fox writes: "He
was full of enthusiasm for Venice, that Q