All happiness befall you and yours this good season and ever.[15]
The present Lord Tennyson, in his biography of his father, makes many interesting allusions to the friendship and the pleasant intercourse between the poets. "Browning frequently dined with us," he says, "and the _tête-à-tête_ conversations between him and my father on every imaginable topic were the best talk I have ever heard, so full of repartee, epigram, anecdote, depth, and wisdom, too brilliant to be possible to reproduce. These brother poets were two of the most widely read men of their time, absolutely without a touch of jealousy, and reveling, as it were, in each other's power.... Browning had a faculty for absurd and abstruse rhymes, and I recall a dinner where Jebb, Miss Thackeray, and Browning were all present, and Browning said he could make a rhyme for every word in the language. We proposed rhinoceros, and without pause he said,
'O, if you should see a rhinoceros And a tree be in sight, Climb quick, for his might Is a match for the gods,--he can toss Eros.'"
A London friend relates that on one occasion Browning chanced upon a literal translation some one had made from the Norwegian:
"The soul where love abideth not resembles A house by night, without a fire or torch,"
and remarked how easy it would be to put this into rhyme; and immediately transmuted it into the couplet,
"What seems the soul when love's outside the porch? A house by night, without a fire or torch."
When Browning's "Inn Album" appeared, and he sent a copy to Tennyson, the Laureate responded:
"MY DEAR BROWNING,--You are the most brotherly of poets, and your brother in the muses thanks you with the affection of a brother. She would thank you too, if she could put hand to pen."
Tennyson once remarked to his son, Hallam, that he wished he had written Browning's lines:
"The little more, and how much it is, The little less, and what worlds away."
There was an interval of twelve years between the appearance of the "Dramatis Personæ" (in 1864) and the publication of "Pacchiarotto." In this collection Browning's amusing play of rhyme is much in evidence. Among Mr. Browning's most enjoyable experiences were his frequent visits to Oxford and Cambridge, in both of which he was an honored guest. In the spring of 1877 he had an especially delightful stay at Oxford, the pleasure even beginning on the train, "full of men, all my friends," he wrote of it; and continued: "I was welcomed on arrival by a Fellow who installed me in my rooms--then came the pleasant meeting with Jowett, who at once took me to tea with his other guests, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, the Dean of Westminster, Lord Airlie, and others."