2161. RB to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 11, 289–290.
[London]
Tuesday Mg [6 January 1846] [1]
I this minute receive the Review [2] —a poor business, truly! Is there a reason for a man’s wits dwindling the moment he gets into a critical High-place to hold forth?– I have only glanced over the article however. Well, one day I am to write of you, dearest, and it must come to something rather better than that!
I am forced to send now what is to be sent at all. Bless you, dearest. I am trusting to hear from you–
Your own
And I find by a note from a fairer friend and favourer of mine that in the “New Quarterly” “Mr Browning” figures pleasantly as “one without any sympathy for a human being!”– [3] Then, for newts and efts, at all events!
Address: Miss Barrett, / 50 Wimpole St
Postmark: None. This letter and envelope apparently sent under separate cover with a copy of The English Review.
Docket, in EBB’s hand: 93.
Publication: RB-EBB, p. 363.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by RB’s reference to “the Review,” for which he thanks Warburton in the following letter.
2. i.e., The English Review; see letter 2155, note 14. This copy formed part of lot 931 in Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, A870; now at ABL).
3. The review stated that the “total absence of all sympathy with the efforts, wishes, and struggles of his fellow-man, is a great defect in the poetry of Robert Browning” (The New Quarterly Review, January 1846). For the text of this review, see pp. 369–371.
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