Old Familiar Faces

Transcribed from the 1916 E. P. Dutton and Company edition by David Price, email [email protected]. Many thanks to Kensington Central Library (http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/libraries/)...

Though my own intimacy with Borrow did not begin till he was considerably advanced in years, and ended on his finally quitting London for Oulton, there were circumstances in our...

I ought to say, however, that Borrow was at that time my hero. From my childhood I had taken the deepest interest in proscribed races such as the Cagots, but especially in the p...

“But what about Isopel Berners?” the reader will ask. “How much of truth and how much of fiction went to the presentation of this most interesting character?” Seeing that Dr. Kn...

Of all forms of literary art biography demands from the artist not only the greatest courage, but also the happiest combination of the highest gifts. To succeed in painting the...

During one of those seaside rambles alluded to above, while he was watching with some friends the billows tumbling in beneath the wintry moon, some one, perhaps Rossetti himself...

Again, certain passages in these letters will surprise the reader by throwing light upon a side of Rossetti’s life and character which was only known to his intimate friends. Re...

All emotion—that of communities as well as that of individuals—is largely governed by the laws of ebb and flow. It is immediately after a national mourning for the loss of a gre...

But for an intimacy to be so strong as that which existed between Tennyson and Arthur H. Hallam there must be a kinship of soul so close and so rare that the tie of blood relati...

And in the pathetic account of Tennyson’s last moments we find it recorded that on the Tuesday before the Wednesday on which he died, he called out, “Where is my Shakespeare? I...

Dominant, however, as was the father’s personality among his friends, the mother’s influence upon the children was stronger than his; and no wonder, for I think there was no bea...

The fruitless thought of what I might have been, Haunting me ever, will not let me rest. A cold North wind has withered all my green, My sun is in the West.

My own friendship with him began at my first meeting him, and this was long ago. Being at that time a less-known man of letters than I am now, supposing that to be possible, I w...

If the poetry in Lord de Tabley’s volume answers as little to Milton’s famous list of the poetic requirements, “simple, sensuous, and passionate,” as does Milton’s own poetry, w...

But supposing that we really had to affirm all these things about the other Olympians, where then would be the position of him about whose work such questions could not even be...

On the other hand, should the story-teller be a poet—one who, like the writer of ‘John Ball,’ has been accustomed to write under the conditions of a form of literary art where t...

As a philologist merely, to speak of nothing else, his equipment was ten times that of Borrow, whose temperament may be called anti-academic, and who really knew nothing thoroug...