The Tower of Queen Cornaro still overlooked the little town, as it had done half a century before; and he attached these last poems to the same tradition by giving them the pleasant title said to have been invented by her secretary.
_Asolando_--_Facts and Fancies_, both titles contain a hint of the ageing Browning,--the relaxed physical energy which allows this strenuous waker to dream (_Reverie; Bad Dreams_); the flagging poetic power, whose fitful flashes could no longer transfigure the world for him, but only cast a fantastic flicker at moments across its prosaic features.

The opening lines sadly confess the wane of the old vision:-- "And now a flower is just a flower: Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man-- Simply themselves, uncinct by dower Of dyes which, when life's day began, Round each in glory ran." The famous Epilogue is the last cheer of an old warrior in whom the stout fibre of heroism still held out when the finer nerve of vision decayed; but _A Reverie_ shows how heavy a strain it had to endure in sustaining his faith that the world is governed by Love.

Of outward evidence for that conviction Browning saw less and less.

But age had not dimmed his inner witness, and those subtle filaments of mysterious affinity which, for Browning, bound the love of God for man to the love of man for woman, remained unimpaired.

The old man of seventy-seven was still, in his last autumn, singing songs redolent, not of autumn, but of the perfume and the ecstasy of spring and youth,--love-lyrics so illusively youthful that one, not the least competent, of his critics has refused to accept them as work of his old age.