SD2663. Diary Entry of Annie Adams Fields

Published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 365 (in part).

[Boston]

Dec. 14 [1863]

A heavy fog and part of the day raining. Virgil’s Epilogues are very beautiful— …

Today dined at ½ past five with Mr and Mrs Otto Dresel. The inauguration of their dinner service. It was a witty table full. I asked Mr Lehman if he did not think Dr Parsons a man of real talents and great eccentricity. “No he is simply a man of some talents who hates his business.” After dinner Mr Dresel played in his own remarkable manner till the electric current ran about the circle and I thought there should be a new poem written describing each listener going his ways with various avocations and feeling the control of these remembered sounds. Mrs Dresel carried me to their small sanctum in the top of the house and read to me a letter by Mrs L.M. Child to her mother overflowing with beauty, richness, and sweetness.

What a mixture of amusement and disgust possesses peoples minds because Browning has given his manuscript of Pippa passes to S. Schlesinger. They can’t recover.

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Massachusetts Historical Society.

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