Correspondence

5266.  RB to Moncure Daniel Conway

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 282.

[London]

August 1. ’63.

Dear Mr Conway,

The month is ended but you have not appeared to claim the poems—here I leave them, therefore, with true thanks for your goodness. I had read the Pilot’s Story and liked it much: [1] the other verses show similar power and beauty. [2] I wish the author well with all my heart, and am

Yours ever faithfully

Robert Browning.

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Harvard University.

1. “The Pilot’s Story,” a narrative poem by William Dean Howells (1837–1920), American novelist, editor, and man of letters, appeared in The Atlantic Monthly of September 1860 (pp. 323–325). It tells of a slave mother’s suicide on a Mississippi steamboat. The poem was later collected in Poems (Boston, 1873).

2. Howells contributed four other poems to The Atlantic Monthly prior to the date of this letter: “Pleasure—Pain” and “Lost Beliefs” (April 1860), “The Old Homestead” (February 1861, afterwards as “The Empty House”), and “Bubbles” (April 1861). All were later published in Poems (Boston, 1873). See William M. Gibson and George Arms, A Bibliography of William Dean Howells (reprint ed., New York, 1971), p. 24.

___________________