SD2783. William Michael Rossetti to William Bell Scott
Somerset House,
14 August 1865
… I am glad Swinburne was right about the beechnuts. I always had an inkling it might turn out as you say it does, but did not venture to say so, conscious that it would be put down as mere thick & thin partisanship. Did I tell you that Browning called at Albany St. three weeks or so ago to make Christina’s acquaintance? He sat talking well & amusingly for an hour or so, & has since expressed himself to me as much gratified with what he saw of Christina. He wants to make his son a diplomatist—having, as he says, seen more than once how much power for good such persons have. He is engaged on a long poem concerning a Roman cause célèbre about 1690 of an elopement of a suffering angel of a wife with an apostolic priest, & the machinations & murder enacted by the husband. The mazes & conflicting appearances of right & wrong in the case, & the difficulty of finding out who deserved to be hung—the husband was so, & rightly, as Browning finally concluded—took possession of his sympathies. I have been reading for the first time the Dramatis Personæ, & not on the whole with much satisfaction; I am sorry not to feel more. Caliban is very good; Sludge able & amusing, but I don’t know that there is any pretext for writing it in verse; of the others most do not appear to me right—partly because they are hard to grasp satisfactorily, & chiefly because the prevailing mental tone of them is rather of ingenious & many-sided (but still very one-charactered) keenness than anything more accurately poetical. No doubt however, like Browning’s other poems, one enjoys them more as one gets more familiar with them. …
Publication: Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti, ed. Roger W. Peattie (University Park, Penn., 1990), pp. 135–137.
Manuscript: Arizona State University Library.
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