Chapter 15 - Page 2

seen the good of before, that it shows me I have taken the
root I _did_ take, _well_. I hope to do much more yet--and that the
flower of it will be put into Her hand somehow. I really have great
opportunities and advantages--on the whole, almost unprecedented ones--I
think, no other disturbances and cares than those I am most grateful for
being allowed to have. . . .'

One of our very few written reminiscences of Mr. Browning's social life
refers to this year, 1864, and to the evening, February 12, on which
he signed his will in the presence of Mr. Francis Palgrave and Alfred
Tennyson. It is inscribed in the diary of Mr. Thomas Richmond, then
chaplain to St. George's Hospital; and Mr. Reginald Palgrave has kindly
procured me a copy of it. A brilliant party had met at dinner at the
house of Mr. F. Palgrave, York Gate, Regent's Park; Mr. Richmond, having
fulfilled a prior engagement, had joined it later. 'There were, in
order,' he says, 'round the dinner-table (dinner being over), Gifford
Palgrave, Tennyson, Dr. John Ogle, Sir Francis H. Doyle, Frank Palgrave,
W. E. Gladstone, Browning, Sir John Simeon, Monsignor Patterson,
Woolner, and Reginald Palgrave.'

Mr. Richmond closes his entry by saying he will never forget that
evening. The names of those whom it had brought together, almost all to
be sooner or later numbered among the Poet's friends, were indeed
enough to stamp it as worthy of recollection. One or two characteristic
utterances of Mr. Browning are, however, the only ones which it
seems advisable to repeat here. The conversation having turned on the
celebration of the Shakespeare ter-centenary, he said: 'Here we are
called upon to acknowledge Shakespeare, we who have him in our very
bones and blood, our very selves. The very recognition of Shakespeare's
merits by the Committee reminds me of nothing so apt as an illustration,
as the decree of the Directoire that men might acknowledge God.'

Among the subjects discussed was the advisability of making schoolboys
write English verses as well as Latin and Greek. 'Woolner and Sir
Francis Doyle were for this; Gladstone and Browning against it.'

Work had now found its fitting place in the Poet's life. It was no
longer the overflow of an irresistible productive energy; it was the
deliberate direction of that energy towards an appointed end. We hear
something of his own feeling concerning this in a letter of August '65,
again from Ste.-Marie, and called forth by some gossip concerning him
which Miss Blagden had connected with his then growing fame.

'. . . I suppose that what you call "my fame within these four years"
comes from a little of this gossiping and going about, and showing
myself to be alive: and so indeed some folks