Francis Paget.
At the beginning of this year Mr. Romanes collected his various poems and had them privately printed. He writes to his sister:
February 1889.
Three weeks before the 11th I was wondering what I should get as a wedding-day present to mark the tenth anniversary. Ethel then chanced to say that she wished my poems were published, so that she could have them in type. This suggested to me the idea of putting them into type for private circulation, when they might serve at once as the required wedding-present, and as a preliminary to publication at any future time either by myself or, more probably, by her or someone else. So I got an estimate from the printer, and with an awful rush he set up the whole in a week. Proof corrections occupied another week, and the binding of a grand presentation copy the third week. Thus I only had my present ready a few hours before it had to be presented. Binding the other copies occupied the time till I sent you yours. In Ethel's copy (which is awfully swell) I have written a special sonnet, as I did in yours.
These poems, or rather a selection from them, will be published, in accordance with the author's wish.
Of his poetry, his sonnets (which were privately printed) seem the most successful. Various friends saw the privately printed book, and the present Professor of Poetry at Oxford gratified Mr. Romanes very much by his own kind words respecting them, and also by submitting them to Lord Tennyson, who spoke of them in kindly terms, as did also Dean Church, Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. George Meredith, and others. Two letters he received about his poems are here given:
From the Dean of St. Paul's.
Ettenheim, Torquay: February 26, 1889.
My dear Mr. Romanes,—Thank you very much for your kindness in thinking me worthy of your gift. I am always glad to see science and poetry go together. It was the way with the earliest efforts of natural science, as Empedocles and Lucretius; and when the strictest thinking of science is done, there is still something more of expression and meaning, of which poetry is the natural and only adequate interpreter.
My acquaintance with your volume is as yet only superficial. But I have been very much impressed by 'Charles Darwin,' and by the 'Dream of Poetry.' It is a very pleasant volume to open, and does not send one away empty and cold; which means that it is genuine poetry. We do not get on very fast; but we are better here than in London, and the place is pleasant.