SD2965. Diary Entry of William Michael Rossetti
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 382.
[London]
Sunday, 15 March 1868
Browning called. He greatly deprecates the publication by Tennyson of the trifling affairs which are now appearing in Good Words and Once a Week etc.: he says that T[ennyson]’s books are declining in sale within this year or two (perhaps the influence of Swinburne). Browning’s forthcoming poem exceeds 20,000 lines: it may probably be out in July, but he would defer it if he finds that more conducive to the satisfactory completion of the work. He began it in October ’64. Was staying at Bayonne, and walked out to a mountain-gorge traditionally said to have been cut or kicked out by Roland, and there laid out the full plan of his twelve cantos, accurately carried out in the execution. He says he writes day by day on a regular systematic plan—some three hours in the early part of the day: he seldom or never, unless in quite brief poems, feels the inspiring impulse and sets the thing down into words at the same time—often stores-up a subject long before he writes it. He has written his forthcoming work all consecutively—not some of the later parts before the earlier. His Son is entered at Balliol College, Oxford. He talked a good deal about his owl, which is most intelligent. It will kiss him gently all over the face with its beak, tweak his hair, etc., and, if one says “Poor old fellow!” or so in a commiserating voice, it puts on a sympathetic appearance of depression.
Publication: Rossetti Papers, 1862 to 1870, comp. William Michael Rossetti (London, 1903), p.302.
Manuscript: University of British Columbia.
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