How great her sorrow was for the death of her friend, Browning knew, doubtless, but nobody else, I think, in the world save myself.

I have now before me one of her little scraps of letters, in which she encloses one from Mrs. Browning which is of the highest interest.  The history and genesis of it is as follows.  Shortly after the publication of the well-known and exquisite little poem on the god Pan in the Cornhill Magazine, my brother Anthony wrote me a letter venturing to criticise it, in which he says:  “The lines are very beautiful, and the working out of the idea is delicious.  But I am inclined to think that she is illustrating an allegory by a thought, rather than a thought by an allegory.  The idea of the god destroying the reed in making the instrument has, I imagine, given her occasion to declare that in the sublimation of the poet the man is lost for the ordinary purposes of man’s life.  It has been thus instead of being the reverse; and I can hardly believe that she herself believes in the doctrine which her fancy has led her to illustrate.  A man that can be a poet is so much the more a man in becoming such, and is the more fitted for a man’s best work.  Nothing is destroyed, and in preparing the instrument for the touch of the musician the gods do nothing for which they need weep.  The idea however is beautiful, and it is beautifully worked.”

Then follows some verbal criticism which need not be transcribed.  Going on to the seventh stanza he says, “In the third line of it, she loses her antithesis.  She must spoil her man, as well as make a poet out of him—­spoil him as the reed is spoilt.  Should we not read the lines thus:—­

  “’Yet one half beast is the great god Pan
  Or he would not have laughed by the river. 
  Making a poet he mars a man;
  The true gods sigh,’ &c.”?

In justice to my brother’s memory I must say that this was not written to me with any such presumptuous idea as that of offering his criticism to the poetess.  But I showed the letter to Isa Blagden, and at her request left it with her.  A day or two later, she writes to me:  “Dear friend,—­I send you back your criticism and Mrs. B.’s rejoinder.  She made me show it to her, and she wishes you to see her answer.”  Miss Blagden’s words would seem to imply that she thought the criticism mine.  And if she did, Mrs. Browning was doubtless led to suppose so too.  Yet I think this could hardly have been the case.

Of course my only object in writing all this here is to give the reader the great treat of seeing Mrs. Browning’s “rejoinder.”  It is very highly interesting:—­

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