In the last letter my wife received from him he wrote: "I heartily wish I had been privileged to begin feeling twenty years ago what I feel now, and I shall make what amends are in my power, by feeling so as long as I live."
I was in the Abbey on the cheerless, foggy, December day, when Browning joined the "Poets" in their "Corner."
I had the honour of enjoying the friendship of that distinguished man of letters, Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton. He once told me a story worth repeating. He was in search of a piece of furniture. On entering a dealer's shop in Wardour Street, he caught sight of the portrait of an admiral, apparently of the last century, and of this he asked the price. "Ten pounds," was the answer. Lord Houghton offered five; the dealer was obdurate. The article wanted was sought for, found and bargained for. On going away Lord Houghton returned to the price of the admiral's portrait. At last the dealer said: "Well, my lord, and to your lordship only, seven pound ten"; but his customer would not go beyond his offer of a fiver, and there was an end of the matter.
Soon afterwards, visiting a neighbour in Yorkshire, Lord Houghton recognised the portrait of the admiral hanging in the dining-room, and said: "Hallo! who's that? What have you got there? Something new?" "Yes," replied the friend; "he was a well-known admiral in his day—fought with Nelson—good bit of work too—recently bequeathed to us— an ancestor of my wife's." "Ah, was he?" said Lord Houghton. "Six weeks ago he was within two pound ten of becoming one of mine!"
Henry James
Once, at a dinner party we gave, a scrupulously clean-shaven guest was announced, whose name neither host nor hostess had caught. He shook hands gaily with us both, and as he moved away to another couple, whom he evidently knew, I gathered from the expression of my wife's face that she, like myself, had no idea of his identity. A bachelor friend who was next announced, after speaking familiarly with the puzzling stranger, came back to me and said, happily in the hearing of my wife: "Do you like Henry James's appearance better with or without his beard?" The mystery was solved. That sort of transformation seems hardly fair.
I beg to be forgiven if I quote a few words from Henry James, written in The Middle Years: "How can I think of the 'run' of the more successful of Mr. Robertson's comedies at the 'dear little old' Prince of Wales's Theatre, by Tottenham Court Road, as anything less than one of the wonders of our age?"
Some ten years ago, James became a British subject—many people, I dare say, have thought him to have always been one—and in return England rightly bestowed upon him the Order of Merit.
Even at the end, when telling a friend of the pain he suffered in his fatal illness, he was gay, and said of death, that he felt the distinguished thing had come to him at last. Much the same thought doubtless crossed the mind of Charles Frohman, the theatrical manager, when he went down on board the Lusitania. He turned to his companion with the words, borrowed from Peter Pan: "Now for the great adventure." Courage is expressed in many wonderful ways.