1347. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 7, 270–272.
[London]
August 3. 1843.
It does indeed seem that more days than usual have intervened, my dearest friend, between you & me—but I feel that you are in the midst of social pleasures, & that I have little in my solitude which I dare to talk about in their neighbourhood. Flush lies across my feet, & my ivy waves in the wind,—& a new just finished poem of some six or seven hundred lines, a ‘Vision of Poets,’ [1] (which is allegorical & mystical & nearly everything it ought not to be to please you)—is on one side of me—and what am I to say to you who are talked to from morning till night by a congregation of tongues, & go to sleep afterwards in a bower of rose-trees, to dream of prize-ploughshares,—of any of these things? This however reminds me to reproach you for your cruel reference to rose-trees, in the matter of my ivy-boughs. I boast of my ivy!—& straightway you wonder that I shd care for such a gloomy thing,—talking incontinently of the rose-buds which look in at your bedroom window—yours! The Duke of Devonshire might just as well observe to his peasantry––“I wonder that you dine upon wooden platters, instead of golden plate”—just as well. My objection is by no means to rosetrees, although I like ivy: but the ivy will live in a box, yes & flourish magnanimously in the straightness of a box—whereas for a rose-tree to grow in London at all out of a regular garden is as impossible as you can think it. Well! you have not demoralized me! You have not forced me to murmur! I am satisfied with my ivy! For two months, everybody except Mr Kenyon, declared it would die: for three weeks almost everybody except Mr Kenyon reiterated that it was dead. When the hidden life burst out suddenly in a hundred leaves, my “all hail” [2] was joyous & grateful—and apart from the circumstances, I like ivy, & ruins (I am not like you), I like “ivied towers” & “moping owls” [3] & all the rest of it: I should like not to be able to see out of any one of my three windows for the thickness of the ivy,—& I look forward to the hypothesis of the thing, in some season to come. Therefore, if you please, I will keep my ivy, as you do your rose-trees, & we wont envy one another. I, who have ivy, have not rosetrees; and you, who have rose-trees, have not vines & myrtles—there is something beyond each of us, for dreaming of.
I am wondering within myself whether you have Mr Horne yet [4] as well as the rosetrees. Do tell me everything in your own inimitable clairvoyant way– You shall be Mesmer to me, & draw my spirit across your threshold that I may see & hear the whole—that is, you will be Mesmer, if you are as goodnatured as you are strong-natured, ‘for the nonce.’ By the way, what is your thought of that Mesmer, & his men & women, inclusive of the Okeys?– [5] A young acquaintance of ours, Miss Minto, a very accomplished & intelligent young woman, has lately submitted to an experimental course of magnetism; & my brother Henry was in the room two days ago when she was thrown into what is called the magnetic sleep. To suspect her of hypocrisy is impossible—and she slept & talked & tasted just as her Mesmeric master was pleased to command—& made faces when he drank vinegar, & started aside, when he was pricked with a pin, .. seemed to adopt in fact his senses for her own in so inexplicable a manner, that reading pica by the pit of one’s stomach, is very little, if at all, more extraordinary. It is easy to say “humbug”,—and perhaps as easy to swallow the world & its follies whole by an “omniverous” credulity. But not to be either a stupid infidel or a credulous hoaxee, is really hard,—where one’s experience & what one calls one’s philosophy, lie on one side,—& a heap of phenomena on the other, .. which are contrary to the experience of our senses & yet presented anew under the evidence of those very senses. For my part, .. perhaps I am credulous naturally. I am ready to believe everything in the way of the spirit-world—& what I am inclined to think or not to think of Mesmerism, is of little worth even to myself. Have you heard much of it? & your impression, .. may I ask for that?–
Mr Kenyon promised to come & see me in two days, .. oh, many days ago. But his brother lives between him & me, & intercepts his thoughts & steps I suspect! He is too kind to be reproached, & the sin is too natural for reproaching, were it even so.
It thunders. Are you afraid of thunder? “No, to be sure not,!—how could you ask such a question?” Because I am afraid. That is, a thunderclap, a lightening-flash overcomes me, makes me trembling & pale [6] —& although Dr Chambers used to explain me benignantly to myself, & talk of the “electric fluid’s subtle influences on a sensitive <***>
Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 276–278.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Hardly finished; the published version comprised 1,005 lines.
2. III Henry VI, V, 7, 34.
3. Cf. Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard” (1751), lines 9–10.
4. Letter 1349 indicates that his visit to Miss Mitford would commence on 8 August.
5. “On a warm May afternoon in 1838, a fashionable throng of ladies and gentlemen filled the amphitheatre of the London University College Hospital to overflowing. Dr. John Elliotson was demonstrating his treatment of mental patients by mesmerism.... Physicians attended, although some of Elliotson’s colleagues stayed away and raised the cry of quackery.... Elliotson’s experiments were largely performed upon two epileptic girls, the Misses Jane and Elizabeth O’Key” (“Those Mesmeric Victorians,” by Arno L. Bader, The Colophon, Summer 1938, p. 335). “Elliotson, the most prominent of the English converts to the new science imported from France, originally intended to use it strictly for medical purposes. But an appetite for publicity soon led him to explore the more exotic features of mesmerism” (Spellbound, by Maria M. Tatar, 1978, p. 189).
6. Several accounts of EBB’s behaviour in storms are to be found in Diary (e.g., pp. 35, 52 and 54).
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