34445- AND OTHER POEMS BY ROBERT BROWNING WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON BROWNING'S AND NOTES BY HELOISE E. HERSEY AND PREFACE BY WILLIAM J. ROLFE, A. M. BOSTON D. LOTHROP & COMPANY FRANKLIN AND HAWLEY STREETS PREFACE. WHEN Miss Hersey and I were working together on the Select Poems of Browning last July, she suggested that an edition of the "Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day" might be an appropriate book for the coming holiday season. I assented most heartily, and urged her to prepare the book at once, that it might be in the printer's hands before I should return from Europe in October. My contribution to the work, I said, should be the Preface; and to this promise, made with little thought that it would be taken seriously, she and the publishers now hold me. What more need I say? That I believe Browning to be a great religious poet, and why I believe it? But what could I say that has not been sufficiently said—and far better iii |