Note 25 — Chapter IX

It was on his first experience of this kind, more than a quarter of a century earlier, that he wrote the nobly patriotic lines of "Home Thoughts from the Sea," and that flawless strain of bird-music, "Home Thoughts from Abroad:" then, also, that he composed "How they brought the Good News." Concerning the last, he wrote, in 1881 (vide The Academy, April 2nd), "There is no sort of historical foundation about [this poem]. I wrote it under the bulwark of a vessel off the African coast, after I had been at it long enough to appreciate even the fancy of a gallop on the back of a certain good horse, 'York,' then in my stable at home. It was written in pencil on the fly-leaf of Bartoli's Simboli, I remember."