1065. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 183–185.
[London]
Nov. 28th 1842
Just as few lines as I can find it possible to write to you my beloved friend, to leave your mind easier about Mrs Dupuy,—& then, silence for today. I have lived in sackcloth since saturday for forgetting to put the question to Mr Kenyon, .. but he staid a shorter time than usual with me & his talk lures one to wander away from one’s own thoughts after his—& you may punish me with the hardest thought [1] you have in return, for I really & truly forgot all about Mrs Dupuy while he stood within reach of my questioning. Yesterday he was to come to see me again,—but I wdnt trust to that probability, & wrote to him. Well! then he came—& without receiving my note—& so beyond my hours that I cdnt see him. I made Henrietta however ask & receive his answer: and the answer is that the law business, that is, the law-decision, is adjourned for several months, [2] & that in the meanwhile her money cant be touched .. is perfectly safe. He said also that altho’ Mrs Dupuy was uneasy about the future, nobody else among her friends was so (you see you must’nt be what is called particular!) & that her legal friends were as certain of a favorable result as if they held it in their hands. There now! you are not uneasy any more. And oh! how I wish that I could write away all your griefs & anxieties as quickly! That wd make me “a ready writer” indeed! [3]
My most dear friend, you have again been in ‘the bitterness’ of death [4] —and you quite frighten me by this hint of something yet untold which I am to hear, you say, tomorrow, & which is bearing you down in the interim!
For the sickness, if it shd be mere bilious sickness the stomach is likely to recover itself—and the excellence of the pulse disproves any fear of the evil’s arising from exhaustion of the system. Mr May does not seem to take that view of the case at all– And I do trust that your dear patient will rally again up to the point of the knuckle of veal. In the meantime, what can be this new grief? Not illness, oh I do trust! Yet how can I trust at all, after all this wearing & watching & grieving—& you, worn enough before!
I have read through Pollok’s Course of Time,—& I confess it appeared to me an extroardinary [sic] work for a young poet—full of grand conceptions half formed—& tracked everywhere with unequal staggering footsteps of genius. [5] One page of it is worth all Robert Montgomery’s set poems—he being to my mind, about as good a poet as my Flush is. Flush can bark & make a noise, too! and the Revd Robert Montgomery cant do any more.
Yet he sells .. I was going to say as if he were an Apollo [6] —but Apollos dont sell now à days—wdnt at least, if they came down to try.
Think of a sixteenth & seventeenth edition of Montgomery’s Messiah!! It is a reproach to the age. [7]
Mr Leigh Hunt & Mr Horne have been reviewing Tennyson & Browning in the Church of England quarterly, & I shall send you the book by my next opportunity. Mr Horne is acute & generous as he always is,—but Leigh Hunt’s article, altho’ honest in criticism, I do not doubt, & wise in many of the remarks, strikes me as cold welcome from a poet to a poet—& to such a poet as Tennyson!—& I felt a little vexed while I was reading it. [8]
Did I tell you, what you wont care to hear, that Papa has just made a purchase of the piano of new construction by Marden, [9] —the melophonion it is called,—& that my sisters are delighted with it? The form emulates the harp, thus Illus. & is wrought of carved rose-wood & gold —the tone being at once powerful & sweet. It is a grand piano, in fact, reversed upwards—& has some peculiarities otherwise in the construction—all for the better—as it is of course for our interest to think now.
I am writing as in the dark—not knowing what you may be suffering! & I have no heart to write any more.
I love you tenderly whether you are in grief or joy—& in grief most tenderly.
Believe that!
Your EBB–
Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 96–98.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Cf. As You Like It, I, 2, 183–184.
2. See letter 1055, note 10.
3. “So that the sum of all is, ready writing makes not good writing; but good writing brings on ready writing” (Jonson, Timber; or Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter, 1641, no. cxxiv).
4. I Samuel, 15:32.
5. The Course of Time (1827) by Robert Pollok (1798–1827) was “conceived on a stupendous scale … it tends to prolixity and discursiveness, but is relieved by passages of sustained brilliancy” (DNB).
6. Apollo was the god of all the fine arts, including poetry.
7. In letter 1058, EBB had said “Montgomery is no more a poet than my Flush is”; despite her low opinion of his ability, The Omnipresence of the Deity, published in 1828, was extraordinarily popular, reaching a 28th edition in 1855.
8. Both articles appeared in the October 1842 issue. Although conceding that Tennyson was a genuine poet, Hunt found him “indolent, over-refining … he runs, or rather reposes, altogether upon feelings (not to speak it offensively) too sensual.” For the text of Horne’s remarks on RB’s works, see pp. 381–388.
9. W. Mardon, piano-maker, had premises at 15 Gt. Portland Street.
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