"Trop de livres."
"Voulez-vous m'en donner un, afin que je puisse me ressouvenir de vous?"
"Avec plaisir."
I have been accordingly this morning to town, where the thing is procurable, and as I chose a volume of which I judged the binding might take the imperial eye, I said to myself, "Here do I present my poetry to a personage for whom I do not care three straws; why should I not venture to do as much for a young lady I love dearly, who, for the author's sake, will not impossibly care rather for the inside than the outside of the volume?" So I was bold enough to take one and offer it for your kind acceptance, begging you to remember in days to come that the author, whether a good poet or no, was always, my Alma, your affectionate friend, Robert Browning. ==
His look was a continual and serene gleam. Lamartine, who remarks this of Bossuet in his youth, adds a phrase which, as observant acquaintances of the poet will agree, might be written of Browning — "His lips quivered often without utterance, as if with the wind of an internal speech."
Except for the touching and beautiful letter which he wrote from Asolo about two months before his death, to Mr. Wilfrid Meynell, about a young writer to whom the latter wished to draw the poet's kindly attention — a letter which has a peculiar pathos in the words, "I shall soon depart for Venice, on my way homeward" — except for this letter there is none so well worth repetition here as his last word to the Poet-Laureate. The friendship between these two great poets has in itself the fragrance of genius. The letter was written just before Browning left London.
==
29 De Vere Gardens, W.,
August 5th, 1889.
My dear Tennyson, — To-morrow is your birthday — indeed, a memorable one. Let me say I associate myself with the universal pride of our country in your glory, and in its hope that for many and many a year we may have your very self among us — secure that your poetry will be a wonder and delight to all those appointed to come after. And for my own part, let me further say, I have loved you dearly. May God bless you and yours.
At no moment from first to last of my acquaintance with your works, or friendship with yourself, have I had any other feeling, expressed or kept silent, than this which an opportunity allows me to utter — that I am and ever shall be, my dear Tennyson, admiringly and affectionately yours, Robert Browning. ==
Shortly after this he was at Asolo once more, the little hill-town in the Veneto, which he had visited in his youth, and where he heard again the echo of Pippa's song —