SD2956. Diary Entry of William Michael Rossetti
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 380 (in part).
[London]
Thursday, 13 February 1868
Some friends in the evening at Euston Square: Browning one of them, looking exceedingly well, and behaving most cordially and affably. He says he gets up daily at 6 (or 5, I am not sure which), and sits without a fire till 8 or so. His new edition, now just coming out, is on a strictly chronological scheme: he says that he finds the heavier works, such as dramas, read much the most agreeably thus arranged. Pauline is included in the edition, in consequence of his having received a letter from somebody who professes a great enthusiasm for the unacknowledged works of distinguished authors, and who contemplated publishing some considerable part of P[auline] in some form—so B[rowning] found the best thing to do would be to take the affair into his own hands, and republish the whole poem with proper press-corrections—not any re-writing, which he objects to. His great new poem ought to be out towards July, through Smith and Elder: he has left Chapman and Hall, finding them unmanageably careless. He describes the general quality of the poem as the same transaction seen from a number of differing points of view, or glimpses in a mirror. I find he has seen what I wrote about him in the Swinburne pamphlet, as he made a most good-humored reference to the passage about his eyes. He liked Stillman’s Cretan wine; and this led to my talking about S[tillman] to Miss Browning, whom I find to be a warm friend of his: she especially charged me to send S[tillman] her love (and to his Wife also) when next I write. Browning expresses (as I had before been told) a very high opinion of Morris’s Jason …
Publication: Rossetti Papers, 1862 to 1870, comp. William Michael Rossetti (London, 1903), pp. 298–299.
Manuscript: University of British Columbia.
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