"Dublin." His Irish friends discovered these and explained that they were from the Archbishop (Trench). "At 'Dublin's' breakfast," says Miller, "I met Robert Browning, Dean Stanley, Lady Augusta, a lot more ladies, and a duke or two, and after breakfast 'Dublin' read to me—with his five beautiful daughters grouped about—from Browning, Arnold, Rossetti, and others, till the day was far spent." The other great feast of the season was an all-night dinner with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, at which "the literary brain" of London was present. As he recalled the event, with an intoxication of delight, later in the summer: "These giants of thought, champions of the beautiful earth, passed the secrets of all time and all lands before me like a mighty panorama. . . . If I could remember and write down truly and exactly what these men said, I would have the best and the greatest book that was ever written."
What he recorded of the conversation is not overpoweringly impressive; but from this rather bewildering contact with the pre-Raphælite group Miller departed with a vivid conviction that he, too, was above all else a lover of the beautiful, and he carried away a strong impression, which markedly affected his next volume of poems, that beauty is resident in "alliteration and soft sounds." Perhaps, however, the most noteworthy utterance which he preserved was his own reply to a question of Rossetti's:
