ABSTRACT
I’ve been scandalously neglecting my duties to follow-Euterpe, I think, but it is one anyway of the nine harlots-these few weeks past experimenting with divers metres and various rhymes. The results serve excellent well to light fires and the work amuses one while it goes on. There’s a heap in verse though apt to get out of hand-some of it-very. Do you know to the extent you ought the poems of Donne who was Browning’s great-great grandfather? I’ve been reading him again for the health of my spirit and-he is no small singer. Must have been a haughty and proud stomached individual in his life-with R.B.’s temperament for turning his mind clean upside down as it were a full bottle and letting the ideas get out as they best could. He is not very accessible-all of him-by reason of his statements which are occasionally free. There were giants in those days and it is profitable to read ’em [he instances Fletcher, Drayton, and Drummond]. These are not of the first ranks you say? No but they worked largely and gave all they had to their verses. Read ’em again and yet again.
