Correspondence

1216.  EBB to Mary Russell Mitford

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 7, 81–83.

[London]

April 19. [1843] [1]

I send a little shabby frock & cap to the Baby, my dearest friend, with the hope that K. may forgive the deficiencies & let them be worn on ‘work-days’. Some other time the poor little thing shall have something better; & my only meaning in sending today, is to give a token of good wishes & true interest, worthier of acceptation. I hope you understood by my hieroglyphic of the oysters, that I thought of you while I did not write—& I hope, in writing today, that my letter may find you in the midst of packing & racking, with your face turned to the soft west, & the day fixed for your setting out on the journey. It will delight me to hear of your having gone—and I think you right in avoiding the railway [2] & ‘the fear of fear’ [3] which is a sort of danger. I can sympathize thoroughly I am sorry to confess, in that sort of feeling. Moreover you require calm: & the absence of irritating causes can alone give calm, & restore your nerves to their former strength. If you were afraid of the coach, I would rather walk, were I you, than expose myself to that frightful fear—& then, it is no object with you to fly [4] into Devonshire. You want change of scene & air, & the longer you are on the road the more you multiply your remedy & opportunity for renovation. May God bless it all into peace & health & joy to you!– May God bless you, my dearest friend!–

I had a letter yesterday from Mr Mathews of New York to whom when I wrote last I had mentioned your subscription; & this is the notice he takes of it, a little to my disappointment– “It is painful indeed to know that this lady suffers after a life of pure & hopeful labor: and I wish to Heaven it were in our power on this side the water, to alleviate her condition– We owe her not a little & should pay it: but I am afraid that an attempt to aid her at this time, would fail; so that good wishes must go into the treasury to help brighten the substantial good of her own countrymen.” [5] This is however only the view taken of the subject by an individual; & I have not given up the hope of hearing some good news from America .... Boston perhaps!– [6] Have you heard from any of your American correspondents lately? and do they talk of good wishes purely?– Yet good wishes are good things & true, & worthy of acceptance & good thanks. Tell me when you write of Mrs Dupuy. I shd like much to hear a more satisfactory account of her–

Ever your most affec.

EBB

Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 210–211.

Manuscript: Wellesley College.

1. Year provided by discussion of K.’s baby in previous letters.

2. In her Recollections of a Literary Life (1852), Miss Mitford wrote of her journey to Bath: “Going thither with health and spirits so shattered by a long illness and a great sorrow, that I could not muster courage to encounter the imaginary dangers of the Box Tunnel, I returned, in the course of a few weeks, so completely restored in mind and body, that when, in the midst of that same tunnel, the ghost of my departed fear met me in the shape of a story … of the foolish lady who had been so exquisitely silly as to hire a fly to escape from the peril, my fellow-travellers really refused to believe that the person who laughed so heartily at her past folly could possibly have been the real heroine of the legend” (II, 194–195).

3. Cf. Montaigne, “De la Peur” (Essays, 1580).

4. EBB is, of course, making a pun on Miss Mitford’s hiring a fly to avoid the tunnel.

5. EBB is quoting from letter 1194.

6. i.e., from Lowell.

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