1007. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 74–75
[London]
Septr 14. 1842–
My very dear friend,
I have made you wait a long time for the North American Review, [1] because when your request came it was no longer within my reach, & because since then I have not been as 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 & adversities are more fit for us than a constant sun.
I suppose, dear Mr Boyd, you want only to have this review read to you, & not written. Because it is’nt out of laziness that I send the book to you,—and Arabel wd copy whatever you please willingly, provided you wished it. Keep the book as long as you please. I have put a paper mark & a pencil mark at the page & paragraph where I am taken up. It seems to me that the condemnation of the Seraphim is not too hard. The poem wants unity. [2]
As to your “words of fire” [3] about Wordsworth, if I had but a cataract at command I wd try to quench them. His powers shd 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 affairs?—his sonnet upon Westminster bridge?—his lyric on a lark, in which the lark’s music swells & exults?—and the many noble & glorious passages of his Excursion? [4] You must not indeed blame me for estimating Wordsworth at his height .. & on the other side I readily confess to you that he is occasionally & not unfrequently heavy & dull—& 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 re-publication, but both full of inspiration.
Ever my very dear friend’s
affectionate & grateful
EBB
Address: H S Boyd Esqr / 21. Downshire Hill / Hampstead.
Publication: LEBB, I, 109–110.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. EBB had told Boyd about the Review in letter 1000.
2. The writer found EBB’s “great defect” to be “a certain lawless extravagance, … which blends into the same group the most discordant images … The firm earth seems to roll away from under our feet, and we are tossed upon a restless sea of fantastic imagery till the brain reels.” (For the full text of the review, see pp. 373–379.)
3. Cf. Jeremiah, 23:29.
4. EBB refers to Wordsworth’s “Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”; Sonnet XXIX, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802”; “To a Skylark”; and The Excursion. Dryden commemorated St. Cecilia’s Day in A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day (1687) and Alexander’s Feast; or the Power of Musique. An Ode, in Honour of St. Cecilia’s Day (1697).
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