I heard him read once. There were visitors in the house who wished to hear the great man, and it was after midnight before a general retirement could take place. He had a rich, sonorous, over-proof, pre-war voice, considerable irritability, and a pretty girl sitting on his knee. The last item was, of course, an instance of poetical licence. The girl had asked him to read from "Maud" and he had consented. He began with his voice turned down so low that in my position behind the screen I could only just catch the opening lines: "Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert..." He opened the throttle a little wider when he came to the passage: "His head was bare, his matted hair Was buried in the sand." He read that last line "was serried in the band," but immediately corrected himself. And the poignant haunting repetition of the last lines of the closing stanza were given out on the full organ: "And everywhere that Mary went-- And everywhere that Mary went-- And everywhere that Mary went-- The lamb was sure to go." It was a great--a wonderful experience for me, and I shall never forget it. I have spoken of his irritability. It is not unnatural in a great poet. He must live with his exquisite sentient nerves screwed up to such a pitch that at any moment something may give. For example, one evening he was sitting with a girl on his knee, and had just read to her these enchanting lines in which he speaks of hearing the cuckoo call. INMEMORISON (_gruffly and suddenly_): What bird says cuckoo? GIRL (_with extreme nervous agitation_): The rabbit. INMEMORISON: No, you fool--it's the nightingale. The girl burst into tears and said she would not play any more. I think she was wrong. Whenever I hear any criticism of myself I always take it meekly and gently, whether it is right or wrong--it has never been right yet--and try to see if I cannot learn something from it. What the girl should have said was: "Now it's your turn to go out, and we'll think of something." Another occasion when Inmemorison was perhaps more pardonably annoyed was when a young undergraduate asked him to read out one of his poems. "Which?" said Inmemorison. I am told that the thirty seconds of absolute silence which followed this question seemed like an eternity, and that the agony on the young man's face was Aeschylean. He did not know any precise answer to the question. "Which?" repeated Inmemorison, like the booming of a great bell at a young man's funeral. The young man made a wild and misjudged effort, and got right off the target. "Well," he said, "one of my greatest favourites of course is 'Kissingcup's Race.'" "Is it, indeed?" said the Poet. "If you turn to the left on leaving the house, the second on the right will take you straight to the station." The young man never forgave it. And that, so I have always been told, is how the first Browning Society came to be founded.