After more sheets had been corrected and returned to Palace Court, he writes:--
"It seems to me that they read better than I had expected--particularly the large additions to 'To a Poet Breaking Silence,'[26] which were written at a time when I was by no means very fit for poetry. Your interest in the volume is very dear to me. I cannot say I myself feel any elation about it. I am past the time when such things brought me any elation.
"I have not either of your books,[27] and of course should most greatly value them. I need not say how deeply I rejoice at your success."
[23] In after years Francis wrote letters that seemed to supply no possible opening for the comforter. Read to-day, their desperation offers no outlet but a return to the streets. But no sooner did F. T. come into my father's presence, than he was consoled, often without the exchange of a word.
[24] Browning left Asolo at the end of October, and died in Venice early in December.
[25] For all that, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, who walked over his own acres with Thompson as his guest, wrote:--"He could not distinguish the oak from the elm, nor did he know the name of the commonest flowers of the field."
[26] The poem by which my mother broke silence was "Veni Creator."
[27] Among the things he wrote when A. M.'s book came to hand is this of "Domus Angusta," an essay they had discussed before. "Never again meditate the suppression of your gloomy passages. It is a most false epithet for anything you could ever write. You might as well impeach of gloominess my favourite bit in 'Timon,' with the majestic melancholy of its cadence--
'My long sickness Of wealth and living now begins to mend, And nothing brings me all things.'
Both that passage and yours are poignant; both are deeply sad; while yours has an added searchingness which makes it (in De Quincey's phrase) veritably 'heart-shattering'; but how can you call 'gloomy' what so nobly and resignedly faces the terror it evokes?"
IN 1893 Messrs. Elkin Mathews and John Lane published _Poems_, a square book in brown boards with gold circles and a frontispiece by Laurence Housman. The poet viewed it with pleasure, and elsewhere the praise and blame it received were both wholehearted:--
