The Argosy — page 131: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

112 Robert Browning. I can’t trust myself to be earnest about it. JI would, you know I would, always would, choose you out of the whole English world to judge and correct what I write myself. My wife shall read this, and let it stand, if I have told her so, these twelve years ; and certainly I have not grown intellectually an inch over the good and kind hand you extended over my head, how many years ago!” The letter is long, too long to quote in this place; after speaking of English books and newspapers, or rather the want of them in Italy, Mr. Browning adds: “ Yet for me there would be one book better than any now to be got, here or elsewhere, and all out of a ereat English head and heart—those ‘‘ Memoirs” you engaged to give us. Will you give us them ?” Those memoirs, alas! were never written. He that should have written, and he that would have read them, both now rest beneath the sod. My father died in 1864 :— ‘©’ The poet died last month, and now The world which had been somewhat slow In honouring his living brow, Commands the palms.” E. F. BRIDELL-FOXx, LOCH KATRINE. ft. How calm and fair, how very fair thy face That August evening when I saw thee first ! Thy glorious beauty like a vision burst Full on me, and I lingered for a space, Breathing the soft enchantment of the place, To feel myself in fairyland, immersed In lore and legend of an age that nursed The finer fortunes of a fairy race. Ben A’an and Ben Venue had held me bound In loving reverence and in awe made sweet By all the beauty of the nearer ground, The Trossachs, rising lovely from my feet ; But that first gleam of thee, that sudden sight, Filled me and overwhelmed me with delight. Il, Wearing thy poet’s praises as a crown, Thy beauty crowns him with its own excess, And if he gave thee glory, thou no less Hast given him profusely of thine own ; Thy fame and his, inseparably grown, And thine and Ellen’s loveliness, express One immortality, one loveliness, Whereof we see the sum in thee alone. Loch of the lovely isle and silver strand, In whose bright waves new beauty ever breaks, In whose deep heart, where cloud and sky expand, Perpetual joy, perpetual music wakes, Fairer than all thy sisters in the land, Thou art thyself the Lady of the Lakes ! GEORGE COTTERELL. Gomilcbooks.co