1943. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 262–264.
[London]
Saturday. [14 June 1845] [1]
Ever dearest friend, Day by day I have meant to write .. write .. with thoughts full of you & the monthly nurse & the inadequate staircase. You are vexed & tormented I fear—& thus, I do not smile in writing that—but wish hard for you such good wishes as fulfil themselves, in your creed, & a little in mine. But the heat is intense: & the Hedleys are here day after day, & I get tired & dont sleep as I ought to do, & so pass into a habit of putting off writing letters & not performing duties of the like order. After all you say, I really think I shall take courage & send you something in the way of linen, & perhaps a collar or two—? You wd not be angry? I have a covetous spirit haunting me with the wish. Only I shd like to know the size of your table. Would you tell me? & without a word more of cruelty in the way of refusal—because, you see, it is so hot that to put on a great cloak of excusation wd overcome both of us.
I have seen Elliott’s poems but not in the form you mention [2] —& I always estimated him highly as a true poet, earnest & heart-sound—of no great imaginative scope, .. that is, of an imagination not imperiously creative, .. but bright & alive in its sphere & place. I like him & honour him in his degree—& ‘à tout seigneur, honneur,’ [3] you know! So you are helping Mr Hall into light with the public! [4] That is right & kind of you—& I wish to both of you, all success. Have you seen Lowell’s ‘Conversations on the old Poets,’––the American Lowell’s? And do you know that Bryant is in London? [5] & to touch on what interests us more nearly, that dear Mr Kenyon is? He looks well & talks joyously, & has rejoiced in his excursion, he says,—& enquires after you with earnest re-iteration. Have you read Arnold’s Life, you who mention it in relation to Mr Blackstone? [6] And will you bear in constant mind my dear dear friend, that you are by no means to cry ‘peccavi,’ [7] though you set about doing so with such an air of dauntless glorying humility, & such a proud confession of caring a little for those bad poets Milton & Dryden. Why how you do scorn me in your secret soul .. me & my tribe, .. from under the bland dropping of your eyelids! You know you do—& I know it too!——& am humble in my way, but pour cause. [8]
As to Zoe, [9] I shall send for her—feeling the uncommon price of your compliment to an English novel which is not Miss Austen’s. The critics seem to admit its power, without giving one a very high idea of original faculty in the writer, I have fancied. The sister Jewsbury [10] was a woman of more comprehensiveness of mind & of a higher logical faculty than are commonly found among women—but it is true, what you observe, that she has done little, if anything. Her life was an aspiration: noble indeed, in its kind, & affecting (to my thoughts,) as a remembrance—but no more!– Those letters of hers in Mr Chorley’s memoir of Mrs Hemans were strikingly superior to the poetess’s,—do you not think so? [11] It was impossible to help recognizing in them a working-power .... though no worthy work was left behind! Hand & mallet fell together—but once they were upraised—& nothing is much more affecting to me than a course half run [12] .. an intention broken off like a branch, .. an aspiration falling, like a bird that flies & falls, when the arrow strikes it!– I have a peculiar feeling for this affliction of the worker.
Oh—now I must end. I am interrupted .. by the Hedleys again!
Ever your affectionate
EBB–
Do write.
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 117–119.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by Kenyon’s return to London on 6 June, and by EBB’s suggestion that she had not written to Miss Mitford for several days, her last letter having been written on 4 June.
2. Presumably Ebenezer Elliott’s poems as collected in Poetical Works (3 vols., 1844).
3. “To each nobleman, Lord” (proverbial French expression).
4. See letter 1930, note 10.
5. For an account of Bryant’s trip to England in 1845, see his Letters from a Traveler (1850), as well as William Cullen Bryant (1971) by Charles H. Brown. Lowell’s Conversations on Some of the Old Poets (1845), first published in Boston, had just been issued in London.
6. As previously noted (see letter 1738), The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold, D.D. by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley was published in 1844. Frederick Charles Blackstone (see letter 1935, note 7), was a correspondent of Thomas Arnold.
7. “I have sinned.”
8. “For a good reason.”
9. Zoe: The History of Two Lives (3 vols., 1845) was the first major publication by Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury (1812–80).
10. Geraldine’s sister, Maria Jane Fletcher (née Jewsbury, 1800–33). Wordsworth, “who addressed his poem of ‘Liberty’ to her in 1829, said that in the quickness of the motions of her mind she had no equal within the range of his acquaintance”; and “Miss Landon spoke of the ‘extreme perfection of her language; it was like reading an eloquent book full of thought and poetry’” (DNB).
11. In Chorley’s Memorials of Mrs. Hemans (1836), I, 132–148 (see also letter 1658).
12. Cf. II Timothy 4:7.
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