indicated in its title. Mr.
Browning answered or anticipated them fifteen years ago in a letter to
Miss Lee, of West Peckham, Maidstone. It was his reply to an application
in verse made to him in their very young days by herself and two other
members of her family, the manner of which seems to have unusually
pleased him.

Villers-sur-mer, Calvados, France: September 7, '75.

Dear Friends,--Your letter has made a round to reach me--hence the delay
in replying to it--which you will therefore pardon. I have been asked
the question you put to me--tho' never asked so poetically and so
pleasantly--I suppose a score of times: and I can only answer, with
something of shame and contrition, that I undoubtedly had Wordsworth in
my mind--but simply as 'a model'; you know, an artist takes one or two
striking traits in the features of his 'model', and uses them to start
his fancy on a flight which may end far enough from the good man or
woman who happens to be 'sitting' for nose and eye.

I thought of the great Poet's abandonment of liberalism, at an unlucky
juncture, and no repaying consequence that I could ever see. But--once
call my fancy-portrait 'Wordsworth'--and how much more ought one to
say,--how much more would not I have attempted to say!

There is my apology, dear friends, and your acceptance of it will
confirm me Truly yours, Robert Browning.

Some fragments of correspondence, not all very interesting, and his
own allusion to an attack of illness, are our only record of the poet's
general life during the interval which separated the publication of
'Pippa Passes' from his second Italian journey.

An undated letter to Miss Haworth probably refers to the close of 1841.

'. . . I am getting to love painting as I did once. Do you know I was
a young wonder (as are eleven out of the dozen of us) at drawing? My
father had faith in me, and over yonder in a drawer of mine lies, I
well know, a certain cottage and rocks in lead pencil and black currant
jam-juice (paint being rank poison, as they said when I sucked my
brushes) with his (my father's) note in one corner, "R. B., aetat. two
years three months." "How fast, alas, our days we spend--How vain
they be, how soon they end!" I am going to print "Victor", however, by
February, and there is one thing not so badly painted in there--oh, let
me tell you. I chanced to call on Forster the other day, and he pressed
me into committing verse on the instant, not the minute, in