Supporting Documents

SD1529.  William Michael Rossetti to William Bell Scott

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 277 (in part).

38 Arlington St.

Mornington Crescent.

4 Decr 1851

… As to your returning “Sordello,” I only hope you will reconcile yourself to keeping it a little longer, & determine to lose—or, as I think, gain—some leisure hours in mastering it. If you can make up your mind to beginning it over again, I fancy that the delight you would find in the earlier portions, now that the bristling asperity of the first reading has subsided, would impulse you triumphantly to a conclusion. You & Browning have the common vantage ground of unintelligibility to the Athenæum, which, I suspect, is halfway to a mutual intelligibility.– Talking of Browning, I remember that Allingham tells me, in a letter I had from him recently, that Browning wrote him “a very kind note” about his volume. …

Publication: Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti, ed. Roger W. Peattie (University Park, Penn., 1990), pp. 22–25.

Manuscript: Arizona State University Library.

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