979. EBB to John Kenyon
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 21.
Wimpole Street
Sunday evening– [26 June 1842] [1]
My dear Mr Kenyon, I am so sorry to hear of your going,—& I not able to say ‘good bye’ to you–—— that .. I am not writing this note on that account.
It is a begging note; & now I am wondering to myself whether you will think me very childish or womanish or silly enough to be both together, (I know your thoughts upon certain parallel subjects!) if I go on to do my begging fully.
I hear that you are going to Mr Wordsworth’s—to Rydal Mount [2] —& I want you to ask for yourself & then to send to me in a letter .. by the post, I mean—two cuttings out of the garden—of myrtle or geranium: I care very little which or what else. Only I say ‘myrtle’ because it is less given to die, and I say two, to be surer of my chances of saving one. Will you? You wd please me very much by doing it,—& certainly not displease me by refusing to do it. Your broadest ‘no’ wd not sound half so strange to me as my “little crooked thing” [3] does to you—but you see everybody in the world is fanciful about something, & why not EBB ?
Dear Mr Kenyon, I have a book of your’s—M. Rio’s. [4] If you want it before you go, just write in two words “send it”; or I shall infer from your silence that I may keep it until you come back. No necessity for answering this otherwise! Is it as bad as asking for autographs? or worse? At any rate believe me in earnest this time—besides being, with every wish for your enjoyment of mountains & lakes & ‘cherrytrees,’ ever
Affectionately yours
EBB
Publication: LEBB, I, 59–60 (as [?1838]).
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. In the following letter, EBB tells Miss Mitford that Kenyon has left London for the Lake District.
2. Wordsworth had moved to Rydal Mount from Grasmere Parsonage early in 1813, after the death of two of his children—Catherine (d. 4 June 1812, aged 3), and Thomas (d. 1 December 1812, aged 6).
3. We have not located the source of this quotation.
4. Possibly Alexis François Rio, La petite chouannerie ou Histoire d’un collège breton sous l’Empire (Paris, 1842). Kenyon published a sonnet on the work in the April 1845 issue of Hood’s Magazine.
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