I thought of the great Poet's abandonment of liberalism, at an unlucky
juncture, and no repaying consequence that I could ever see. But--once
call my fancy-portrait 'Wordsworth'--and how much more ought one to
say,--how much more would not I have attempted to say!

There is my apology, dear friends, and your acceptance of it will
confirm me Truly yours, Robert Browning.


Some fragments of correspondence, not all very interesting, and his
own allusion to an attack of illness, are our only record of the poet's
general life during the interval which separated the publication of
'Pippa Passes' from his second Italian journey.

An undated letter to Miss Haworth probably refers to the close of 1841.


'. . . I am getting to love painting as I did once. Do you know I was
a young wonder (as are eleven out of the dozen of us) at drawing? My
father had faith in me, and over yonder in a drawer of mine lies, I
well know, a certain cottage and rocks in lead pencil and black currant
jam-juice (paint being rank poison, as they said when I sucked my
brushes) with his (my father's) note in one corner, "R. B., aetat. two
years three months." "How fast, alas, our days we spend--How vain
they be, how soon they end!" I am going to print "Victor", however, by
February, and there is one thing not so badly painted in there--oh, let
me tell you. I chanced to call on Forster the other day, and he pressed
me into committing verse on the instant, not the minute, in Maclise's
behalf, who has wrought a divine Venetian work, it seems, for the