of our knowledge, he first saw the land of his inspiration in 1838,
sailing from London on April 13th, passing through the Straits of
Gibraltar on the twenty-ninth, and reaching Trieste on May 30th. On
the first of June he entered Venice. It was on a walking-trip that
he first saw the village of Asolo, about thirty miles to the
northeast of Venice. Little did he then realise how closely his name
would be forever associated with this tiny town. The scenes of
_Pippa Passes_ he located there: the last summer of his life, in
1889, was spent in Asolo, his last volume he named in memory of the
village; and on the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, the
street where he lived and wrote in 1889 was formally named Via
Roberto Browning. His son, Robert Barrett Browning, lived to see
this event, and died at Asolo on July 8, 1912.

The long and obscure poem _Sordello_ was published in 1840; and then
for thirty years Browning produced poetry of the highest order:
poetry that shows scarcely any obscurity, and that in lyric and
dramatic power has given its author a fixed place among the greatest
names in English literature.

The story of the marriage and married life of Elizabeth Barrett and
Robert Browning is one of the greatest love stories in the world's
history; their love-letters reveal a drama of noble passion that
excels in beauty and intensity the universally popular examples of
Heloise and Abelard, Aucassin and Nicolette, Paul and Virginia.
There was a mysterious bond between them long before the personal
acquaintance: each admired the other's poetry. Miss Barrett had a
picture of Browning in her sickroom, and declared that the adverse
criticism constantly directed against his verse hurt her like a lash
across her own back. In a new volume of poems, she made a