Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  I shall send you soon the series of the Greek papers you asked for, and also perhaps the first paper of a Survey of the English Poets, under the pretence of a review of ‘The Book of the Poets,’ a bookseller’s selection published lately. I begin from Langland, of Piers Plowman and the Malvern Hills. The first paper went to the editor last week, and I have heard nothing as to whether it will appear on Saturday or not, and perhaps if it does you won’t care to have it sent to you. Tell me if you do or don’t. I have suffered unpleasantly in the heart lately from this tyrannous dynasty of east winds, but have been well otherwise, and am better, in that. Flushie means to bark the next time he sees you in revenge for what you say of him.

  Good bye, dear Mr. Boyd; think of me as

  Your ever affectionate

  E.B.B.

  To H.S. Boyd

  June 3, 1842.

  My very dear Friend, — I disobeyed you in not simply letting you know of the publication of my ‘English Poets,’ because I did not know myself when the publication was to take place, and I hope you will forgive the innocent crime and accept the first number going to you with this note. I warn you that there will be two numbers more at least. Therefore do not prepare yourself for perhaps the impossible magnanimity of reading them through.

  And now I am fit for rivalship with your clocks, papa having given me an Aeolian harp for the purpose. Do you know the music of an Aeolian harp, and that nothing below the spherical harmonies is so sweet and soft and mournfully wild? The amusing part of it is (after the poetical) that Flushie is jealous and thinks it is alive, and takes it as very hard that I should say ‘beautiful’ to anything except his ears!

  Arabel talks of going to see you; but if you are sensible to this intense and most overcoming heat, you will pardon her staying away for the present.

  We have heard to-day that Annie proposes to publish her Miscellany by subscription; and although I know it to be the only way, compatible with publication at all, to avoid a pecuniary loss, yet the custom is so entirely abandoned except in the case of persons of a lower condition of life than your daughter, that I am sorry to think of the observations it may excite. The whole scheme has appeared to me from the beginning most foolish, and if you knew what I know of the state and fortune of our ephemeral literature, you would use what influence you have with her to induce her to condemn her ‘contributions’ to the adorning of a private annual rather than the purpose in unhappy question. I wish I dared to appeal through my true love for her to her own good sense once more.

  My very dear friend’s affectionate and grateful

  E.B.B.

  If you do read any of the papers, let me know, I beseech you, your full and free opinion of them.

  To H.S. Boyd

  June 22, 1842.

  My very dear Friend, — I thank you gratefully for your two notes, with their united kindness and candour — the latter still rarer than the former, if less ‘sweet upon the tongue.’ Sir William Alexander’s tragedy (that is the right name, I think, Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling) you will not find mentioned among my dramatic notices, because I was much pressed for room, and had to treat the whole subject as briefly as possible, striking off, like the Roman, only the heads of the flowers, and I did not, besides, receive your injunction until my third paper on the dramatists was finished and in the press. When you read it you will find some notice of that tragedy by Marlowe, the first knowledge of which I owe to you, my dear Mr. Boyd, as how much besides? And then comes the fourth paper, and I tremble to anticipate the possible — nay, the very probable — scolding I may have from you, upon my various heresies as to Dryden and Pope and Queen Anne’s versificators. In the meantime you have breathing time, for Mr. Dilke, although very gracious and courteous to my offence of extending the two papers he asked for into four, yet could find no room in the ‘Athenaeum’ last week for me, and only hopes for it this week. And after this week comes the British Association business, which always fills every column for a month, so that a further delay is possible enough. ‘It will increase,’ says Mr. Dilke, ‘the zest of the reader,’ whereas I say (at least think) that it will help him quite to forget me. I explain all this lest you should blame me for neglect to yourself in not sending the papers. I am so pleased that you like at least the second article. That is encouragement to me.

  Flushie did not seem to think the harp alive when it was taken out of the window and laid close to him. He examined it particularly, and is a philosophical dog. But I am sure that at first and while it was playing he thought so.

  In the same way he can’t bear me to look into a glass, because he thinks there is a little brown dog inside every looking glass, and he is jealous of its being so close to me. He used to tremble and bark at it, but now he is silently jealous, and contents himself with squeezing close, close to me and kissing me expressively.

  My very dear friend’s ever gratefully affectionate

  E.B.B.

  To John Kenyon

  50 Wimpole Street: Sunday night [September 1842].

  My dear Mr. Kenyon, — Having missed my pleasure to-day by a coincidence worse for me than for you, I must, tired as I am to-night, tell you — ready for to-morrow’s return of the books — what I have waited three whole days hoping to tell you by word of mouth. But mind, before I begin, I don’t do so out of despair ever to see you again, because I trust steadfastly to your kindness to come again when you are not ‘languid’ and I am alone as usual; only that I dare not keep back from you any longer the following message of Miss Mitford. She says: ‘Won’t he take us in his way to Torquay? or from Torquay? Beg him to do so — and of all love, to tell us when.’ Afterwards, again: ‘I think my father is better. Tell Mr. Kenyon what I say, and stand my friend with him and beg him to come.’

  Which I do in the most effectual way — in her own words.

  She is much pleased by means of your introduction. ‘Tell dear Mr. Kenyon how very very much I like Mrs. Leslie. She seems all that is good and kind, and to add great intelligence and agreeableness to these prime qualities.’

  Now I have done with being a messenger of the gods, and verily my caduceus is trembling in my hand.

  O Mr. Kenyon! what have you done? You will know the interpretation of the reproach, your conscience holding the key of the cypher.

  In the meantime I ought to be thanking you for your great kindness about this divine Tennyson. Beautiful! beautiful! After all, it is a noble thing to be a poet. But notwithstanding the poetry of the novelties — and you will observe that his two preceding volumes (only one of which I had seen before, having inquired for the other vainly) are included in these two — nothing appears to me quite equal to ‘Oenone,’ and perhaps a few besides of my ancient favorites. That is not said in disparagement of the last, but in admiration of the first. There is, in fact, more thought — more bare brave working of the intellect — in the latter poems, even if we miss something of the high ideality, and the music that goes with it, of the older ones. Only I am always inclined to believe that philosophic thinking, like music, is involved, however occultly, in high ideality of any kind.

  You have not a key to the cypher of this at least, and I am so tired that one word seems tumbling over another all the way.

  Ever affectionately yours,

  ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

  You will let me keep your beautiful ballad and the gods a little longer.

  To H.S. Boyd

  September 14, 1842.

  My very dear Friend, — I have made you wait a long time for the ‘North American Review,’ because when your request came it was no longer within my reach, and because since then I have not been so well as usual from a sweep of the wing of the prevailing epidemic. Now, however, I am better than I was even before the attack, only wishing that it were possible to hook-and-eye on another summer to the hem of the garment of this last sunny one. At the end of such a double summer, to measure things humanly, I might be able to go to see you at Hampstead. Nevertheless, winters and adversi
ties are more fit for us than a constant sun.

  I suppose, dear Mr. Boyd, you want only to have this review read to you, and not written. Because it isn’t out of laziness that I send the book to you; and Arabel would copy whatever you please willingly, provided you wished it. Keep the book as long as you please. I have put a paper mark and a pencil mark at the page and paragraph where I am taken up. It seems to me that the condemnation of ‘The Seraphim’ is not too hard. The poem wants unity.

  As to your ‘words of fire’ about Wordsworth, if I had but a cataract at command I would try to quench them. His powers should not be judged of by my extracts or by anybody’s extracts from his last-published volume. Do you remember his grand ode upon Childhood — worth, to my apprehension, just twenty of Dryden’s ‘St. Cecilia’s Day’ — his sonnet upon Westminster Bridge, his lyric on a lark, in which the lark’s music swells and exults, and the many noble and glorious passages of his ‘Excursion’? You must not indeed blame me for estimating Wordsworth at his height, and on the other side I readily confess to you that he is occasionally, and not unfrequently, heavy and dull, and that Coleridge had an intenser genius. Tell me if you know anything of Tennyson. He has just published two volumes of poetry, one of which is a republication, but both full of inspiration.

  Ever my very dear friend’s affectionate and grateful

  E.B.B.

  To Mrs. Martin

  50 Wimpole Street: October 22, 1842.

  My dearest Mrs. Martin, — Waiting first for you to write to me, and then waiting that I might write to you cheerfully, has ended by making so long a silence that I am almost ashamed to break it. And perhaps, even if I were not ashamed, you would be angry — perhaps you are angry, and don’t much care now whether or not you ever hear from me again. Still I must write, and I must moreover ask you to write to me again; and I must in particular assure you that I have continued to love you sincerely, notwithstanding all the silence which might seem to say the contrary. What I should like best just now is to have a letter speaking comfortable details of your being comparatively well again; yet I hope on without it that you really are so much better as to be next to quite well. It was with great concern that I heard of the indisposition which hung about you, dearest Mrs. Martin, so long — I who had congratulated myself when I saw you last on the promise of good health in your countenance. May God bless you, and keep you better! And may you take care of yourself, and remember how many love you in the world, from dear Mr. Martin down to — E.B.B.

  Well, now I must look around me and consider what there is to tell you. But I have been uneasy in various ways, sometimes by reason and sometimes by fantasy; and even now, although my dear old friend Dr. Scully is something better, he lies, I fear, in a very precarious state, while dearest Miss Mitford’s letters from the deathbed of her father make my heart ache as surely almost as the post comes. There is nothing more various in character, nothing which distinguishes one human being from another more strikingly, than the expression of feeling, the manner in which it influences the outward man. If I were in her circumstances, I should sit paralysed — it would be impossible to me to write or to cry. And she, who loves and feels with the intensity of a nature warm in everything, seems to turn to sympathy by the very instinct of grief, and sits at the deathbed of her last relative, writing there, in letter after letter, every symptom, physical or moral — even to the very words of the raving of a delirium, and those, heart-breaking words! I could not write such letters; but I know she feels as deeply as any mourner in the world can. And all this reminds me of what you once asked me about the inscriptions in Lord Brougham’s villa at Nice. There are probably as many different dialects for the heart as for the tongue, are there not?...

  And now you will kindly like to have a word said about myself, and it need not be otherwise than a word to give your kindness pleasure. The long splendid summer, exhausting as the heat was to me sometimes, did me essential good, and left me walking about the room and equal to going downstairs (which I achieved four or five times), and even to going out in the chair, without suffering afterwards. And, best of all, the spitting of blood (I must tell you), which more or less kept by me continually, stopped quite some six weeks ago, and I have thus more reasonable hopes of being really and essentially better than I could have with such a symptom loitering behind accidental improvements. Weak enough, and with a sort of pulse which is not excellent, I certainly remain; but still, if I escape any decided attack this winter — and I am in garrison now — there are expectations of further good for next summer, and I may recover some moderate degree of health and strength again, and be able to do good instead of receiving it only.

  I write under the eyes of Wordsworth. Not Wordsworth’s living eyes, although the actual living poet had the infinite kindness to ask Mr. Kenyon twice last summer when he was in London, if he might not come to see me. Mr. Kenyon said ‘No’ — I couldn’t have said ‘No’ to Wordsworth, though I had never gone to sleep again afterwards. But this Wordsworth who looks on me now is Wordsworth in a picture. Mr. Haydon the artist, with the utmost kindness, has sent me the portrait he was painting of the great poet — an unfinished portrait — and I am to keep it until he wants to finish it. Such a head! such majesty! and the poet stands musing upon Helvellyn! And all that — poet, Helvellyn, and all — is in my room!

  Give my kind love to Mr. Martin — our kind love, indeed, to both of you — and believe me, my dearest Mrs. Martin,

  Your ever affectionate BA.

  Is there any hope for us of you before the winter ends? Do consider.

  To H.S. Boyd

  Monday, October 31, 1842.

  My very dear Friend, — I have put off from day to day sending you these volumes, and in the meantime I have had a letter from the great poet! Did Arabel tell you that my sonnet on the picture was sent to Mr. Haydon, and that Mr. Haydon sent it to Mr. Wordsworth? The result was that Mr. Wordsworth wrote to me. King John’s barons were never better pleased with their Charta than I am with this letter.

  But I won’t tell you any more about it until you have read the poems which I send you. Read first, to put you into good humour, the sonnet written on Westminster Bridge, vol. iii. page 78. Then take from the sixth volume, page 152, the passage beginning ‘Within the soul’ down to page 153 at ‘despair,’ and again at page 155 beginning with

  I have seen

  A curious child, &c.

  down to page 157 to the end of the paragraph. If you admit these passages to be fine poetry, I wish much that you would justify me further by reading, out of the second volume, the two poems called ‘Laodamia’ and ‘Tintern Abbey’ at page 172 and page 161. I will not ask you to read any more; but I dare say you will rush on of your own account, in which case there is a fine ode upon the ‘Power of Sound’ in the same volume. Wordsworth is a philosophical and Christian poet, with depths in his soul to which poor Byron could never reach. Do be candid. Nay, I need not say so, because you always are, as I am,

  Your ever affectionate

  ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

  To H.S. Boyd

  December 4, 1842.

  My very dear Friend, — You will think me in a discontented state of mind when I knit my brows like a ‘sleeve of care’ over your kind praises. But the truth is, I won’t be praised for being liberal in Calvinism and love of Byron. I liberal in commending Byron! Take out my heart and try it! look at it and compare it with yours; and answer and tell me if I do not love and admire Byron more warmly than you yourself do. I suspect it indeed. Why, I am always reproached for my love to Byron. Why, people say to me, ‘You, who overpraise Byron!’ Why, when I was a little girl (and, whatever you may think, my tendency is not to cast off my old loves!) I used to think seriously of dressing up like a boy and running away to be Lord Byron’s page. And I to be praised now for being ‘liberal’ in admitting the merit of his poetry! I!

  As for the Calvinism, I don’t choose to be liberal there either. I don’t call myself a Calvinist. I hang suspended
between the two doctrines, and hide my eyes in God’s love from the sights which other people say they see. I believe simply that the saved are saved by grace, and that they shall hereafter know it fully; and that the lost are lost by their choice and free will — by choosing to sin and die; and I believe absolutely that the deepest damned of all the lost will not dare to whisper to the nearest devil that reproach of Martha: ‘If the Lord had been near me, I had not died.’ But of the means of the working of God’s grace, and of the time of the formation of the Divine counsels, I know nothing, guess nothing, and struggle to guess nothing; and my persuasion is that when people talk of what was ordained or approved by God before the foundations of the world, their tendency is almost always towards a confusion of His eternal nature with the human conditions of ours; and to an oblivion of the fact that with Him there can be no after nor before.

  At any rate, I do not find it good for myself to examine any more the brickbats of controversy — there is more than enough to think of in truths clearly revealed; more than enough for the exercise of the intellect and affections and adorations. I would rather not suffer myself to be disturbed, and perhaps irritated, where it is not likely that I should ever be informed. And although you tell me that your system of investigation is different from some others, answer me with your accustomed candour, and admit, my very dear friend, that this argument does not depend upon the construction of a Greek sentence or the meaning of a Greek word. Let a certain word be ‘fore-know’ or ‘publicly favor,’ room for a stormy controversy yet remains. I went through the Romans with you partially, and wholly by myself, by your desire, and in reference to the controversy, long ago; and I could not then, and cannot now, enter into that view of Taylor and Adam Clarke, and yourself I believe, as to the Jews and Gentiles. Neither could I conceive that a particular part of the epistle represents an actual dialogue between a Jew and Gentile, since the form of question and answer appears to me there simply rhetorical. The Apostle Paul was learned in rhetoric; and I think he described so, by a rhetorical and vivacious form, that struggle between the flesh and the spirit common to all Christians; the spirit being triumphant through God in Christ Jesus. These are my impressions. Yours are different. And since we should not probably persuade each other, and since we are both of us fond of and earnest in what we fancy to be the truth, why should we cast away the thousand sympathies we rejoice in, religious and otherwise, for the sake of a fruitless contention? ‘What!’ you would say (by the time we had quarrelled half an hour), ‘can’t you talk without being excited?’ Half an hour afterwards: ‘Pray do lower your voice — it goes through my head!’ In another ten minutes: ‘I could scarcely have believed you to be so obstinate.’ In another: ‘Your prejudices are insurmountable, and your reason most womanly — you are degenerated to the last degree.’ In another — why, then you would turn me and Flush out of the room and so finish the controversy victoriously.