Just a line, for I really have nothing to say this week. I have caught
up with my work. One day we had a rather forlorn little poet and
his nice wife in at lunch. They made me feel quite badly by being
so grateful at my having mentioned him in what I fear was a very
patronizing and, indeed, almost supercilious way, as having written an
occasional good poem. I am much struck by Robinson's two poems which you
sent Mother. What a queer, mystical creature he is! I did not understand
one of them--that about the gardens--and I do not know that I like
either of them quite as much as some of those in "The Children of the
Night." But he certainly has got the real spirit of poetry in him.
Whether he can make it come out I am not quite sure.
Prince Louis of Battenberg has been here and I have been very much
pleased with him. He is a really good admiral, and in addition he is a
well-read and cultivated man and it was charming to talk with him. We
had him and his nephew, Prince Alexander, a midshipman, to lunch alone
with us, and we really enjoyed having them. At the State dinner he sat
between me and Bonaparte, and I could not help smiling to myself in
thinking that here was this British Admiral seated beside the American
Secretary of the Navy--the American Secretary of the Navy being the
grandnephew of Napoleon and the grandson of Jerome, King of Westphalia;
while the British Admiral was the grandson of a Hessian general who was
the subject of King Jerome and served under Napoleon, and then, by no
means creditably, deserted him in the middle of the Battle of Leipsic.