In fiction, in poetry, French as well as English, and I am told in American also, in art and literature, the shadow of death, call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference, is upon us.

But what fools who talk thus! Why, _amico mio_, you know as well as I, that death is life, just as our daily momentarily dying body is none the less alive, and ever recruiting new forces of existence.
Without death, which is our church-yardy crape-like word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life.
Never say of me that I am dead." On August 13, 1888, he set out once more for Italy, the last of his innumerable voyages.

During his last Italian period he seems to have fallen back on very ultimate simplicities, chiefly a mere staring at nature.

The family with whom he lived kept a fox cub, and Browning would spend hours with it watching its grotesque ways; when it escaped, he was characteristically enough delighted.

The old man could be seen continually in the lanes round Asolo, peering into hedges and whistling for the lizards.
This serene and pastoral decline, surely the mildest of slopes into death, was suddenly diversified by a flash of something lying far below.