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Life and Letters of Robert Browning by Mrs. Sutherland Orr;Robert Browning
page 24 of 401 (05%)
symptom of this condition. The acute ailment reproduced itself in
her daughter in spite of an otherwise vigorous constitution. With the
brother, the inheritance of suffering was not less surely present, if
more difficult to trace. We have been accustomed to speaking of him as a
brilliantly healthy man; he was healthy, even strong, in many essential
respects. Until past the age of seventy he could take long walks without
fatigue, and endure an amount of social and general physical strain
which would have tried many younger men. He carried on until the last a
large, if not always serious, correspondence, and only within the latest
months, perhaps weeks of his life, did his letters even suggest that
physical brain-power was failing him. He had, within the limits which
his death has assigned to it, a considerable recuperative power. His
consciousness of health was vivid, so long as he was well; and it was
only towards the end that the faith in his probable length of days
occasionally deserted him. But he died of no acute disease, more than
seven years younger than his father, having long carried with him
external marks of age from which his father remained exempt. Till
towards the age of forty he suffered from attacks of sore-throat, not
frequent, but of an angry kind. He was constantly troubled by imperfect
action of the liver, though no doctor pronounced the evil serious. I
have spoken of this in reference to his complexion. During the last
twenty years, if not for longer, he rarely spent a winter without a
suffocating cold and cough; within the last five, asthmatic symptoms
established themselves; and when he sank under what was perhaps his
first real attack of bronchitis it was not because the attack was very
severe, but because the heart was exhausted. The circumstances of his
death recalled that of his mother; and we might carry the sad analogy
still farther in his increasing pallor, and the slow and not strong
pulse which always characterized him. This would perhaps be a mistake.
It is difficult to reconcile any idea of bloodlessness with the bounding
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