1832. EBB to John Kenyon
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 60.
[London]
Saturday. Feb. 8 1845.
I return to you, dearest Mr Kenyon, the two numbers of Jerold Douglas’s magazine [1] —& I wish ‘by that same sign,’ [2] I could invoke your presence & advice on a letter I received this morning. You never wd guess what it is—& you will wonder when I tell you that it offers a request from the Leeds’ Ladies Committee, authorized & backed by the London General Council of the League, to your cousin Ba, that she wd write them a poem for the Corn Law Bazaar to be holden at Covent Garden next May—!! [3] Now my heart is with the cause, .. & my vanity besides, perhaps—for I do not deny that I am pleased with the request so made,—& if left to myself, I shd be likely at once to say ‘yes’, & write an agricultural-evil poem to complete the Factory-evil poem into a national-evil circle. And I do not myself see how it wd be implicating my name with a political party, to the extent of wearing a badge. The League is not a party, but “the meeting of the waters” [4] of several parties—& I am trying to persuade Papa’s Whiggery that I may make a poem which will be a fair exponent of the actual grievance, .. leaving the remedy free for the hands of fixed-duty men like him, or free-trade women like myself. As to wearing the badge of a party, either in politics or religion, I may say, that, never in my life, was I so far from coveting such a thing. And then, Poetry breathes in another, outer air. And then, there is not an existent set of any-kind-of-politics, I could agree with, if I tried—I, who am a sort of fossil republican!– You shall see the letter, when you come– Remember what the League newspaper said of the Cry of the Children! [5]
Ever affectionately yours
EBB.
Publication: LEBB, I, 239–240.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. EBB is presumably referring to Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, the first number of which had appeared the previous month.
2. A reference to Constantine’s vision of a cross in the sky, bearing the words “by this sign shalt thou conquer.”
3. See letter 1819, note 9.
4. Doubtless a reference to “A Meeting of the Waters” (1807) by Thomas Moore, with whom Kenyon was acquainted.
5. For the full text of this review, see vol. 9, pp. 378–380.
___________________
