1633. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 22–23.
[London]
June 18. 1844.
Thank you my very dear friend!! I write to you drunk with Cyprus! [1] Nothing can be worthier of either gods or demigods—and if, as you say, Achilles did not drink of it, I am sorry for him!– I suppose Jupiter had it instead, just then,—Hebe pouring it,—and Juno’s ox-eyes bellowing their splendour at it, .. if you will forgive me that broken metaphor, for the sake of Æschylus’s genius ..... and my own particular intoxication.
Indeed, there never was in modern days, such wine! Flush, to whom I offered the last drop in my glass, felt it was supernatural, and ran away. I have an idea that if he had drunk that drop, he wd have talked afterwards .. either Greek or English.
Never was such wine! The very taste of ideal nectar .. only stiller, from keeping. If the bubbles of eternity were on it, we shd run away perhaps, like Flush.
Still, the thought comes to me—ought I to take it from you? Is it right of me? are you not too kind in sending it? and should you be allowed to be too kind? In any case, you must not think of sending me more than you have already sent—it is more than enough—and I am not less than very much obliged to you.
I have passed the middle of my second volume—and I only hope that the critics may say of the rest that it smells of Greek wine.
Dearest Mr Boyd’s
Ever affectionate
E B Barrett.
Address: H S Boyd Esqr / 24 (a) Grove End Road / St John’s Wood.
Publication: LEBB, I, 175.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Boyd had made a gift of Cyprus wine to EBB, which she acknowledged by addressing “Wine of Cyprus” to him in the second volume of Poems (1844). In letter 1670, she told Boyd that its taste reminded her “of oranges & orange flowers together, to say nothing of the honey of Mount Hymettus,” though her father thought it “beastly & nauseous.”
___________________
