his
father.

Shortly after his death I painted a water-colour of his study in De Vere
Gardens. Everything had remained intact. "All here--only our poet's
away," as he says in "Asolando." The empty chair by the writing-table
which bears his initials, the desk which he looked upon as a relic. His
father had used it when a lad, and had taken it with him on his voyage
to the West Indies. The poet possessed it from his earliest boyhood, and
used it all his life; everything he wrote in England, so his sister told
me, was written on that desk. The little dumb keyboard I have already
mentioned in the first of these pages; it had five notes over which he
would mechanically run his fingers. He had a way too of beating a tattoo
on his knee, or he would just for a few seconds mark time, moving his
arm backwards and forwards. Sometimes he would squeeze up his eyes and
look out of the window, or he would take up some little object and
scrutinise it closely, whilst his thoughts were busy elsewhere.

On his table lay a book he had shown me as one he treasured: a little
Greek Bible. On the last leaf was written: "My wife's book and mine."
Pictures by his son hung on the walls; so too a portrait of his wife
when a little girl, by Hayter; one of Hope End, the house in which she
lived, and one of the tomb in the English Cemetery in Florence where she
lies buried. Another reminiscence of her is the low chair to the right
of the table; she at all times liked low seats, and this chair was a
favourite with her.

Among the things on the walls was a pen-and-ink drawing of Tennyson by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti. On the back of it Browning wrote--

"Tennyson read his poem of 'Maud' to E. B. B., R. B., Arabella, and
Rossetti on the evening of September 27, 1855, at 13 Dorset Street,
Manchester Square. Rossetti made this sketch of Tennyson as he sat
reading to E. B. B., who occupied the other end of the sofa.--R.
B., March 6, 1874, 19 Warwick Crescent."

[Greek:
metapiptontos
daimonos]

On the drawing is written in Mrs. Browning's hand--

"I hate the dreadful hollow
Behind the little wood."

The larger bookcase which made up the background for my drawing, he
designed himself. The fine old oak-carvings he had bought many years ago
in Florence, where they had adorned the refectory of some old
monastery; when he got them home, he put them together, with the
assistance of an ordinary carpenter,