Feeling more than usually stupid, I
said to him:
"Well Mr. Meredith, I wonder what your friend Alfred Austin thinks
of his appointment?"
Shaking his beautiful head he replied:
"It is very hard to say what a bantam is thinking when it is
crowing."
Symonds' conversation is described in Stevenson's essay on Talks
and Talkers, but no one could ever really give the fancy, the
epigram, the swiftness and earnestness with which he not only
expressed himself but engaged you in conversation. This and his
affection combined to make him an enchanting companion.
The Swiss postmen and woodmen constantly joined us at midnight and
drank Italian wines out of beautiful glass which our host had
brought from Venice; and they were our only interruptions when
Mrs. Symonds and the handsome girls went to bed. I have many
memories of seeing our peasant friends off from Symonds' front
door, and standing by his side in the dark, listening to the crack
of their whips and their yodels yelled far down the snow roads
into the starry skies.
When I first left him and returned to England, Mrs. Symonds told
me he sat up all night, filling a blank book with his own poems
and translations, which he posted to me in the early morning. We
corresponded till he died; and I have kept every letter that he
ever wrote to me.
He was the first person who besought me to write. If only he were
alive now, I would show him this manuscript and, if any one could
make any thing of it by counsel, sympathy and encouragement; my
autobiography might become famous.
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