_Vailima_, _Samoa_, _April_ 14, 1894.
DEAR SIR,—Long since when I was a boy I remember the emotions with which
I repeated Swinburne’s poems and ballads. Some ten years ago, a similar
spell was cast upon me by Meredith’s _Love in the Valley_; the stanzas
beginning ‘When her mother tends her’ haunted me and made me drunk like
wine; and I remember waking with them all the echoes of the hills about
Hyères. It may interest you to hear that I have a third time fallen in
slavery: this is to your poem called the _Lake Isle of Innisfrae_. It is
so quaint and airy, simple, artful, and eloquent to the heart—but I seek
words in vain. Enough that ‘always night and day I hear lake water
lapping with low sounds on the shore,’ and am, yours gratefully,