SD2981. Diary Entry of William Allingham
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 387 (in part).
[London]
22 May [1868]
Breakfast with Froude, 5 Onslow Gardens … Cab to Browning’s, invited to luncheon. R. B. (grayer)
Tennyson, the Magazines, Morris’s Earthly Paradise, etc.
‘We ought to take up the ball at the furthest point to which it has been thrown. I should be sorry to think that any one was in advance in any way of me in my new Poem.’ Perhaps not quite knowing what to say I remarked bashfully:—
‘I have always been a believer in you,’ or to that effect.
R. B.—‘I am glad to believe that, for your own sake among other things.’
When he went out, I stayed for a chat with Miss Sarianna. ‘Robert, after writing Pauline, went to St. Petersburg, overland, in connection with a diplomatic mission, expenses only paid, and returned the same way after six weeks’ residence at St. Petersburg. He saw the breaking up of the ice on the Neva, and the ceremony of declaring the river open.’
Text: William Allingham, A Diary, ed. H. Allingham & D. Radford (London, 1908), p. 179.
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