I believe that hitherto no Rector has been chosen by the undivided suffrage of any Scottish University.They have heard however that you are unable to accept the office:and your committee,who were deeply disappointed to learn this afternoon of the way in which you have been informed of their intentions,are,I believe,writing to you on the subject.
So keen is their regret that they intend respectfully to wait upon you on Tuesday morning by deputation,and ask if you cannot waive your difficulties in deference to their enthusiasm,and allow them to proceed with your election.
Their suffrage may,I think,be regarded as one sign of how the thoughtful youth of Scotland estimate the work you have done in the world of letters.
And permit me to say that while these Rectorial elections in the other Universities have frequently turned on local questions,or been inspired by political partisanship,St.Andrews has honourably sought to choose men distinguished for literary eminence,and to make the Rectorship a tribute at once of intellectual and moral esteem.
May I add that when the 'perfervidum ingenium'of our northern race takes the form not of youthful hero-worship,but of loyal admiration and respectful homage,it is a very genuine affair.In the present instance I may say it is no mere outburst of young undisciplined enthusiasm,but an honest expression of intellectual and moral indebtedness,the genuine and distinct tribute of many minds that have been touched to some higher issues by what you have taught them.They do not presume to speak of your place in English literature.They merely tell you by this proffered honour (the highest in their power to bestow),how they have felt your influence over them.
My own obligations to you,and to the author of Aurora Leigh,are such,that of them 'silence is golden'.Yours ever gratefully.
William Knight.
Mr.Browning was deeply touched and gratified by these professions of esteem.
He persisted nevertheless in his refusal.The Glasgow nomination had also been declined by him.
On August 17,1877,he wrote to Mrs.Fitz-Gerald from La Saisiaz:
'How lovely is this place in its solitude and seclusion,with its trees and shrubs and flowers,and above all its live mountain stream which supplies three fountains,and two delightful baths,a marvel of delicate delight framed in with trees --I bathe there twice a day --and then what wonderful views from the chalet on every side!
Geneva lying under us,with the lake and the whole plain bounded by the Jura and our own Saleve,which latter seems rather close behind our house,and yet takes a hard hour and a half to ascend --all this you can imagine since you know the environs of the town;the peace and quiet move me the most --And I fancy I shall drowse out the two months or more,doing no more of serious work than reading --and that is virtuous renunciation of the glorious view to my right here --as I sit aerially like Euripides,and see the clouds come and go and the view change in correspondence with them.It will help me to get rid of the pain which attaches itself to the recollections of Lucerne and Berne "in the old days when the Greeks suffered so much,"as Homer says.But a very real and sharp pain touched me here when I heard of the death of poor Virginia March whom I knew particularly,and parted with hardly a fortnight ago,leaving her affectionate and happy as ever.The tones of her voice as on one memorable occasion she ejaculated repeatedly 'Good friend!'are fresh still.
Poor Virginia!...'
Mr.Browning was more than quiescent during this stay in the Savoyard mountains.He was unusually depressed,and unusually disposed to regard the absence from home as a banishment;and he tried subsequently to account for this condition by the shadow which coming trouble sometimes casts before it.
It was more probably due to the want of the sea air which he had enjoyed for so many years,and to that special oppressive heat of the Swiss valleys which ascends with them to almost their highest level.When he said that the Saleve seemed close behind the house,he was saying in other words that the sun beat back from,and the air was intercepted by it.
We see,nevertheless,in his deion of the surrounding scenery,a promise of the contemplative delight in natural beauty to be henceforth so conspicuous in his experience,and which seemed a new feature in it.
He had hitherto approached every living thing with curious and sympathetic observation --this hardly requires saying of one who had animals for his first and always familiar friends.
Flowers also attracted him by their perfume.But what he loved in nature was essentially its prefiguring of human existence,or its echo of it;and it never appeared,in either his works or his conversation,that he was much impressed by its inanimate forms --by even those larger phenomena of mountain and cloud-land on which the latter dwells.Such beauty as most appealed to him he had left behind with the joys and sorrows of his Italian life,and it had almost inevitably passed out of his consideration.
During years of his residence in London he never thought of the country as a source of pleasurable emotions,other than those contingent on renewed health;and the places to which he resorted had often not much beyond their health-giving qualities to recommend them;his appetite for the beautiful had probably dwindled for lack of food.
