Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Give my love to Miss Bordman. When is she coming to see me?

  The thunder did not do me any harm.

  Your affectionate friend, in great haste, although your servant is not likely to think so, E.B.B.

  To H.S. Boyd

  [June 1838.]

  My dear Friend, — You must let me feel my thanks to you, even when I do not say them. I have put up your various notes together, and perhaps they may do me as much good hereafter, as they have already, for the most part, given me pleasure.

  The ‘burden pure have been’ certainly was a misprint, as certainly ‘nor man nor nature satisfy’ is ungrammatical. But I am not so sure about the passage in Isobel:

  I am not used to tears at nights Instead of slumber — nor to prayer.

  Now I think that the passage may imply a repetition of the words with which it begins, after ‘nor’ — thus— ‘nor am I used to prayer,’ &c. Either you or I may be right about it, and either ‘or’ or ‘nor’ may be grammatical. At least, so I pray.

  You did not answer one question. Do you consider that ‘apolyptic’ stands without excuse?

  I never read Greek to any person except yourself and Mr. MacSwiney, my brother’s tutor. To him I read longer than a few weeks, but then it was rather guessing and stammering and tottering through parts of Homer and extracts from Xenophon than reading. You would not have called it reading if you had heard it.

  I studied hard by myself afterwards, and the kindness with which afterwards still you assisted me, if yourself remembers gladly I remember gratefully and gladly.

  I have just been told that your servant was desired by you not to wait a minute.

  The wind is unfavorable for the sea. I do not think there is the least probability of my going before the end of next week, if then. You shall hear.

  Affectionately yours,

  E.B. BARRETT.

  I am tolerably well. I have been forced to take digitalis again, which makes me feel weak; but still I am better, I think.

  In the course of this year the failure in Miss Barrett’s health had become so great that her doctor advised removal to a warmer climate for the winter. Torquay was the place selected, and thither she went in the autumn, accompanied by her brother Edward, her favourite companion from childhood. Other members of the family, including Mr. Barrett, joined them from time to time. At Torquay she was able to live, but no more, and it was found necessary for her to stay during the summers as well as the winters of the next three years. Letters from this period are scarce, though it is clear from Miss Mitford’s correspondence that a continuous interchange of letters was kept up between the two friends, and her acquaintanceship with Horne was now ripening into a close literary intimacy. A story relating to Bishop Phillpotts of Exeter, the hero of so many racy anecdotes, is contained in a letter of Miss Barrett’s which must have been written about Christmas of either 1838 or 1839: —

  ‘He [the bishop] was, however, at church on Christmas Day, and upon Mr. Elliot’s being mercifully inclined to omit the Athanasian Creed, prompted him most episcopally from the pew with a “whereas;” and further on in the Creed, when the benign reader substituted the word condemnation for the terrible one— “Damnation!” exclaimed the bishop. The effect must have been rather startling.’

  A slight acquaintance with the words of the Athanasian Creed will suggest that the story had suffered in accuracy before it reached Miss Barrett, who, of course, was unable to attend church, and whose own ignorance on the subject may be accounted for by remembering that she had been brought up as a Nonconformist. With a little correction, however, the story may be added to the many others on record with respect to ‘Henry of Exeter.’

  The following letter is shown, by the similarity of its contents to the one which succeeds it, to belong to November 1839, when Miss Barrett was entering on her second winter in Torquay.

  To Mrs. Martin

  Beacon Terrace, Torquay: November 24 .

  My dearest Mrs. Martin, — Henrietta shall not write to-day, whatever she may wish to do. I felt, in reading your unreproaching letter to her, as self-reproachful as anybody could with a great deal of innocence (in the way of the world) to fall back upon. I felt sorry, very sorry, not to have written something to you something sooner, which was a possible thing — although, since the day of my receiving your welcome letter, I have written scarcely at all, nor that little without much exertion. Had it been with me as usual, be sure that you should not have had any silence to complain of. Henrietta knew I wished to write, and felt, I suppose, unwilling to take my place when my filling it myself before long appeared possible. A long story — and not as entertaining as Mother Hubbard. But I would rather tire you than leave you under any wrong impression, where my regard and thankfulness to you, dearest Mrs. Martin, are concerned.

  To reply to your kind anxiety about me, I may call myself decidedly better than I have been. Since October I I have not been out of bed — except just for an hour a day, when I am lifted to the sofa with the bare permission of my physician — who tells me that it is so much easier to make me worse than better, that he dares not permit anything like exposure or further exertion. I like him (Dr. Scully) very much, and although he evidently thinks my case in the highest degree precarious, yet knowing how much I bore last winter and understanding from him that the worst tubercular symptoms have not actually appeared, I am willing to think it may be God’s will to keep me here still longer. I would willingly stay, if it were only for the sake of that tender affection of my beloved family which it so deeply affects me to consider. Dearest papa is with us now — to my great comfort and joy: and looking very well! — and astonishing everybody with his eternal youthfulness! Bro and Henrietta and Arabel besides, I can count as companions — and then there is dear Bummy! We are fixed at Torquay for the winter — that is, until the end of May: and after that, if I have any will or power and am alive to exercise either, I do trust and hope to go away. The death of my kind friend Dr. Bury was, as you suppose, a great grief and shock to me. How could it be otherwise, after his daily kindness to me for a year? And then his young wife and child — and the rapidity (a three weeks’ illness) with which he was hurried away from the energies and toils and honors of professional life to the stillness of that death!

  ‘God’s Will’ is the only answer to the mystery of the world’s afflictions....

  Don’t fancy me worse than I am — or that this bed-keeping is the result of a gradual sinking. It is not so. A feverish attack prostrated me on October 2 — and such will leave their effects — and Dr. Scully is so afraid of leading me into danger by saying, ‘You may get up and dress as usual’ that you should not be surprised if (in virtue of being the senior Torquay physician and correspondingly prudent) he left me in this durance vile for a great part of the winter. I am decidedly better than I was a month ago, really and truly.

  May God bless you, dearest Mrs. Martin! My best and kindest regards to Mr. Martin. Henrietta desires me to promise for her a letter to Colwall soon; but I think that one from Colwall should come first. May God bless you! Bro’s fancy just now is painting in water colours and he performs many sketches. Do you ever in your dreams of universal benevolence dream of travelling into Devonshire?

  Love your affectionate BA,

  — found guilty of egotism and stupidity ‘by this sign’ and at once!

  To H.S. Boyd

  1 Beacon Terrace, Torquay:

  Wednesday, November 27, 1839.

  If you can forgive me, my ever dear friend, for a silence which has not been intended, there will be another reason for being thankful to you, in addition to the many. To do myself justice, one of my earliest impulses on seeing my beloved Arabel, and recurring to the kindness with which you desired that happiness for me long before I possessed it, was to write and tell you how happy I felt. But she had promised, she said, to write herself, and moreover she and only she was to send you the ballad — in expectation of your dread judgment upon which I delayed my own writing. I
t came in the first letter we received in our new house, on the first of last October. An hour after reading it, I was upon my bed; was attacked by fever in the night, and from that bed have never even been lifted since — to these last days of November — except for one hour a day to the sofa at two yards’ distance. I am very much better now, and have been so for some time; but my physician is so persuaded, he says, that it is easier to do me harm than good, that he will neither permit any present attempt at further exertion, nor hint at the time when it may be advisable for him to permit it. Under the circumstances it has of course been more difficult than usual for me to write. Pray believe, my dear and kind friend, in the face of all circumstances and appearances, that I never forget you, nor am reluctant (oh, how could that be?) to write to you; and that you shall often have to pay ‘a penny for my thoughts’ under the new Postage Act — if it be in God’s wisdom and mercy to spare me through the winter. Under the new act I shall not mind writing ten words and then stopping. As it is, they would scarcely be worth eleven pennies.

  Thank you again and again for your praise of the ballad, which both delighted and surprised me ... as I had scarcely hoped that you might like it at all. Think of Mr. Tilt’s never sending me a proof sheet. The consequences are rather deplorable, and, if they had occurred to you, might have suggested a deep melancholy for life. In my case, I, who am, you know, hardened to sins of carelessness, simply look aghast at the misprints and mispunctuations coming in as a flood, and sweeping away meanings and melodies together. The annual itself is more splendid than usual, and its vignettes have illustrated my story — angels, devils and all — most beautifully. Miss Mitford’s tales (in prose) have suffered besides by reason of Mr. Tilt — but are attractive and graphic notwithstanding — and Mr. Horne has supplied a dramatic poem of great power and beauty.

  How I rejoice with you in the glorious revelation (about to be) of Gregory’s second volume! The ‘De Virginitate’ poem will, in its new purple and fine linen, be more dazzling than ever.

  Do you know that George is barrister-at-law of the Inner Temple — is? I have seen him gazetted.

  My dearest papa is with me now, making me very happy of course. I have much reason to be happy — more to be grateful — yet am more obedient to the former than to the latter impulse. May the Giver of good give gratitude with as full a hand! May He bless you — and bring us together again, if no more in the flesh, yet in the spirit! again, if no more in the flesh, yet in the spirit!

  Your ever affectionate friend,

  E.B. BARRETT.

  Do write — when you are able and least disinclined. Do you approve of Prince Albert or not?

  To H.S. Boyd

  Torquay: May 29, 1840.

  My ever dear Friend, — It was very pleasant to me to see your seal upon a letter once more; and although the letter itself left me with a mournful impression of your having passed some time so much less happily than I would wish and pray for you, yet there remains the pleasant thought to me still that you have not altogether forgotten me. Do receive the expression of my most affectionate sympathy under this and every circumstance — and I fear that the shock to your nerves and spirits could not be a light one, however impressed you might be and must be with the surety and verity of God’s love working in all His will. Poor poor Patience! Coming to be so happy with you, with that joyous smile I thought so pretty! Do you not remember my telling you so? Well — it is well and better for her; happier for her, if God in Christ Jesus have received her, than her hopes were of the holiday time with you. The holiday is for ever now....

  I heard from Nelly Bordman only a few days before receiving your letter, and so far from preparing me for all this sadness and gloom, she pleased me with her account of you whom she had lately seen — dwelling upon your retrograde passage into youth, and the delight you were taking in the presence and society of some still more youthful, fair, and gay monstrum amandum, some prodigy of intellectual accomplishment, some little Circe who never turned anybodies into pigs. I learnt too from her for the first time that you were settled at Hampstead! Whereabout at Hampstead, and for how long? She didn’t tell me that, thinking of course that I knew something more about you than I do. Yes indeed; you do treat me very shabbily. I agree with you in thinking so. To think that so many hills and woods should interpose between us — that I should be lying here, fast bound by a spell, a sleeping beauty in a forest, and that you, who used to be such a doughty knight, should not take the trouble of cutting through even a hazel tree with your good sword, to find out what had become of me. Now do tell me, the hazel tree being down at last, whether you mean to live at Hampstead, whether you have taken a house there and have carried your books there, and wear Hampstead grasshoppers in your bonnet (as they did at Athens) to prove yourself of the soil.

  All this nonsense will make you think I am better, and indeed I am pretty well just now — quite, however, confined to the bed — except when lifted from it to the sofa baby-wise while they make it; even then apt to faint. Bad symptoms too do not leave me; and I am obliged to be blistered every few days — but I am free from any attack just now, and am a good deal less feverish than I am occasionally. There has been a consultation between an Exeter physician and my own, and they agree exactly, both hoping that with care I shall pass the winter, and rally in the spring, both hoping that I may be able to go about again with some comfort and independence, although I never can be fit again for anything like exertion....

  Do you know, did you ever hear anything of Mr. Horne who wrote ‘Cosmo de Medici,’ and the ‘Death of Marlowe,’ and is now desecrating his powers (I beg your pardon) by writing the life of Napoleon? By the way, he is the author of a dramatic sketch in the last Finden.

  He is in my mind one of the very first poets of the day, and has written to me so kindly (offering, although I never saw him in my life, to cater for me in literature, and send me down anything likely to interest me in the periodicals), that I cannot but think his amiability and genius do honor to one another.

  Do you remember Mr. Caldicott who used to preach in the infant schoolroom at Sidmouth? He died here the death of a saint, as he had lived a saintly life, about three weeks ago. It affected me a good deal. But he was always so associated in my thoughts more with heaven than earth, that scarcely a transition seems to have passed upon his locality. ‘Present with the Lord’ is true of him now; even as ‘having his conversation in heaven’ was formerly. There is little difference.

  May it be so with us all, with you and with me, my ever and very dear friend! In the meantime do not forget me.

  I never can forget you.

  Your affectionate and grateful

  ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

  Arabel desires her love to be offered to you.

  To H.S. Boyd

  1 Beacon Terrace, Torquay: July 8, 1840.

  My ever dear Friend, — I must write to you, although it is so very long, or at least seems so, since you wrote to me. But you say to Arabel in speaking of me that I ‘used to care for what is poetical;’ therefore, perhaps you say to yourself sometimes that I used to care for you! I am anxious to vindicate my identity to you, in that respect above all.

  It is a long, dreary time since I wrote to you. I admit the pause on my own part, while I charge you with another. But your silence has embraced more pleasantness and less suffering to you than mine has to me, and I thank God for a prosperity in which my unchangeable regard for you causes me to share directly....

  I have not rallied this summer as soon and well as I did last. I was very ill early in April at the time of our becoming conscious to our great affliction — so ill as to believe it utterly improbable, speaking humanly, that I ever should be any better. I am, however, a very great deal better, and gain strength by sensible degrees, however slowly, and do hope for the best— ‘the best’ meaning one sight more of London. In the meantime I have not yet been able to leave my bed.

  To prove to you that I who ‘used to care’ for poetry do so still, a
nd that I have not been absolutely idle lately, an ‘Athenaeum’ shall be sent to you containing a poem on the subject of the removal of Napoleon’s ashes. It is a fitter subject for you than for me. Napoleon is no idol of mine. I never made a ‘setting sun’ of him. But my physician suggested the subject as a noble one and then there was something suggestive in the consideration that the ‘Bellerophon’ lay on those very bay-waters opposite to my bed.

  Another poem (which you won’t like, I dare say) is called ‘The Lay of the Rose,’ and appeared lately in a magazine. Arabel is going to write it out for you, she desires me to tell you with her best love. Indeed, I have written lately (as far as manuscript goes) a good deal, only on all sorts of subjects and in as many shapes.

  Lazarus would make a fine poem, wouldn’t he? I lie here, weaving a great many schemes. I am seldom at a loss for thread.

  Do write sometimes to me, and tell me if you do anything besides hearing the clocks strike and bells ring. My beloved papa is with me still. There are so many mercies close around me (and his presence is far from the least), that God’s Being seems proved to me, demonstrated to me, by His manifested love. May His blessing in the full lovingness rest upon you always! Never fancy I can forget or think of you coldly.

  Your affectionate and grateful

  ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

  The above letter was written only three days before the tragedy which utterly wrecked Elizabeth Barrett’s life for a time, and cast a deep shadow over it which never wholly passed away — the death of her brother Edward through drowning. On July 11, he and two friends had gone for a sail in a small boat. They did not return when they were expected, and presently a rumour came that a boat, answering in appearance to theirs, had been seen to founder in Babbicombe Bay; but it was not until three days later that final confirmation of the disaster was obtained by the discovery of the bodies. What this blow meant to the bereaved sister cannot be told: the horror with which she refers to it, even at a distance of many years, shows how deeply it struck. It was the loss of the brother whom she loved best of all; and she had the misery of thinking that it was to attend on her that he had come to the place where he met his death. Little wonder if Torquay was thenceforward a memory from which she shrank, and if even the sound of the sea became a horror to her.