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You are returned or I would ask you to tell me how the Villa Alberti wears, and if the fig-tree behind the house is green and strong yet. I have a pen-and-ink drawing of it, dated and signed the last day Ba was ever there "my fig tree " she used to sit under it, reading and writing. Nine years, or ten rather, since then! Poor old Landor's oak, too, and his cottage, ought not to be forgotten.
Such were the friendships of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and of Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, also that recorded in Landor's shaken lines: Friends! hear the words my wandering thoughts would say, And cast them into shape some other day; Southey, my friend of forty years, is gone, And shattered with the fall, I stand alone.
His rustication, or suspension from Trinity College, Cambridge, came about in the following manner: One evening Landor invited his friends to wine. His gun, powder, and shot were in the next room, as he had been out hunting in the morning of that day. In a room opposite to Landor's lived a young man whom Landor disliked. The two parties exchanged taunts.
Long afterwards he expressed his hope that Landor's biographers would either let him slip off at Lethe's wharf, or else do him justice in a note. Before this unfortunate incident, Landor and Willis had corresponded on cordial terms.
To add to their misery, they were kept in the rain and were afterward seated in a pool of water. The effect of this torture was to strain the muscles of the legs and arms and injure the spine. When Mr. Landor's legs were unloosed from their cords, they were so numbed and swollen that for sixteen hours he did not recover the use of them and feared they were mortifying. Mr.
Browning's devoted maid, and another most faithful servant of hers and her husband's, Ferdinando Romagnoli. Mr. Landor's presence is also referred to, with the more important circumstance of a recent illness of Mrs. Browning's, in two characteristic and interesting letters of this period, one written by Mr. Browning to Frederic Leighton, the other by his wife to her sister-in-law.
Landor's poems in their first edition, because she was sure that it must be fifty years since, and she finds him at this 1843, the very Lothario of Bath, enchanting the wives, making jealous the husbands, and 'enjoying, altogether, the worst of reputations.
Landor's Newfoundland dog, who stretched himself and gaped on the opposite causeway, took something from the lifeless air that belonged to the High Street on every day except Saturday.
The work that he did was intermittent, and between his industrious spasms he read a book. He had a shelf at hand where he kept certain volumes Walt Whitman, Vanity Fair, Austin Dobson, Landor's Imaginary Conversations, and a rather choice collection of Old Mission literature.
The friction of society may animate the man of talent into its exercise, but I am persuaded that solitude is essential to the perfect developement of genius. A letter from Sir William Gell, and, like all his letters, very amusing. Yet how different from Landor's!
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