Correspondence

1981.  EBB to John Kenyon

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 319–321.

[London]

Thursday– [?24] [July 1845] [1]

I am delighted to have your letter my dearest cousin, & make haste to tell you so, before the place which knows you shall know you no more. [2] Over & over again have I thought of you & wondered whether you had been bewitched into one of your friend’s conservatories you told me of, & made to stay & grow there to the end of the season without putting forth one leaf my way,—the silence & absence together appearing so much longer than I had had fears of. Well—but you have written at last—& though I have not many answers for your questions, I will do my catechism as well as I can & say ‘no, no’ to everything almost. I have not seen Miss Mitford—& not heard from Mrs Jameson—& I have not heard anything but very neutral news from America,—& not heard one word of Mr Burges’s emendations,—& not sent my Prometheus to the Scotch Professor, [3] —& not written any poems to signify,—or not been ill from what you call “the winterly summer.” To me on the contrary, it has been a most summerly summer .. a little dull & moist, to be sure .. but neither too hot nor too cold, & with no prevalent east winds riding through it,—& so I have been & am flourishing “after my kind,” [4] & able to sit in the chair, & get out in the carriage, & walk about the room quite as steadily as a child of two years old who is not precocious. Now that’s wonderful for me .. is’nt it?—& in fact everybody exclaims & thinks me wonderfully well—only I am not too proud, having the winter before my eyes, & knowing to what complexion I must come in the next frost. Well! it is summer for two months longer—& I wd not anticipate so much as a snowflake in the way of evils—& besides nobody knows what is to happen, & I may be too warm instead of too cold next christmas day. In the meantime what can Mr Burges have been doing in the way of emending me? Is he not satisfied with my betters & masters among the Greeks hammering nails into the golden vessels of the temple? They can bear it—but my Wedgwood will only break into more shivers you know, the more you hammer it,——I mean, the more he hammers it. How good you are about the Prospective Review! [5] —& I see in the Family Illustrated Journal, the ‘Cry of the Children[’] is selected to be “illustrated by woodcuts.” [6] I just see it in the advertisement. In defense of which glories, Mr Moxon has sent me his account; & though Hope & Mr Kenyon told a flattering tale, scarcely three hundred copies are sold, & the expences not covered by some sixty pounds—the original expences being a hundred & sixty something, I think .. but I never can remember those numbers, even in association with my dear balladmongering. Well! what do you think? Of course being unreasonable, I was disappointed! It looks so awfully unlike a second edition! Still, one cant expect to be happier than more meritorious people—or at least, one ought’nt perhaps!——

The ‘Bells & Pomegranates’ poet I have seen since I saw you—but he is not, I fear, very well .. or quite well enough to be thinking of publishing again immediately. Mr Horne wrote to me the other day to announce a volume of ballads which he has in preparation, [7] & which some hero of a bookseller is going to “risk” without having his own life insured. He .. Mr Horne .. is visiting Miss Mitford just now .. on a second week’s visit in one month—&, as I confess to her, I really do not understand whether she likes or dislikes him, .. she is so very demonstrative both in her personal criticisms & attentions. “All the grandees of the county” were invited to meet him on wednesday—yesterday——& yet she quite vexed me by what she wrote of him some five days before. Only people may do what they like, you know, with their own friends—& he is a little more hers than mine “at these presents.”

Such haste I have written all this in, not to miss the post, & to see Mr Hunter who is waiting my first leisure in the drawingroom I hear. I hope that your active kindness may have success in Mr Bezzi[’]s case– [8] Is there any influential person whom the Hedleys know, & could apply to usefully because they would gladly do it you cannot doubt. Talking of professorships brings me (which my gratitude shd have done in my first page, if she knew how ‘to walk alone’ as well as I do!) talking of professorships brings me to the chair—your’s—& to the thanks I owe you, for the luxury of ‘æternumque sedebit’ [9] would be no punishment even in the gloom of Hades, with such a chair. Only I am for ever an infidel (after sitting in it) to your profession of meaning to “send it up to the garrets”; I believe in your exceeding kindness instead!——

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Wellesley College.

1. Dated by reference to Horne’s second visit to Miss Mitford in July (see letter 1980), and by EBB’s concern about her letter reaching Kenyon, since he was at the end of his “10 days” (see no. 1974).

2. Cf. Paradise Lost, IV, 775.

3. See letter 1935, note 9.

4. Cf. Genesis 1:11, 12.

5. A review of Poems (1844) appeared in The Prospective Review for August 1845, pp. 445–464.

6. Presumably a reference to The Illustrated Family Journal: and Gazette of Variety, a short-lived weekly periodical which issued 21 numbers from 8 March through 26 July 1845. The numbers were bound with a title page that read: “The Illustrated Family Journal: consisting of Historical Romances, Legendary Tales, Poetry, Essays, Anecdotes, &c. with upwards of two hundred illustrations by Linton, &c. London, 1846.” No advertisements appear in the British Library copy, nor any sketches based upon EBB’s poem.

7. Ballad Romances, published by Charles Ollier in 1846; a second edition was published in the same year by John Russell Smith.

8. As previously noted (see letter 668, note 8), Giovanni Aubrey Bezzi (1795–1879), an Italian friend of Kenyon who was later instrumental in the rediscovery of a portrait of Dante in the Bargello in Florence. We have been unable to explain EBB’s reference here, but perhaps Kenyon was trying to assist Bezzi in obtaining a professorship.

9. Cf. “sedet æternumque sedebit infelix Theseus,”—“hapless Theseus sits and evermore shall sit” (Vergil, Æneid, 6, 617, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough).

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