2202. RB to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 12, 48–50.
[London]
Sunday Mg [8 February 1846] [1]
My dearest—there are no words,—nor will be tomorrow, nor even in the Island—I know that! But I do love you[.]
My arms have been round you for many minutes since the last word.
I am quite well now—my other note will have told you when the change began—I think I took too violent a shower bath, with a notion of getting better in as little time as possible,—and the stimulus turned mere feverishness to headache: however, it was no sooner gone, in a degree, than a worse plague came– I sate thinking of you—but I knew my note would arrive at about four oclock or a little later—and I thought the visit for the quarter of an hour would as effectually prevent to-morrow’s meeting as if the whole two hours blessing had been laid to heart– To-morrow I shall see you, Ba, my sweetest. But there are cold winds blowing to-day—how do you bear them, my Ba? “Care” you, pray, pray, care for all I care about—and be well, if God shall please, and bless me as no man ever was blessed! Now I kiss you, and will begin a new thinking of you—and end, and begin, going round and round in my circle of discovery. My lotos-blossom! because they loved the lotos, were lotos-lovers,—λωτουτ᾽ερωτες [2] as Euripides writes in the Τρἕωαδες
Your own RB
P.S. See those lines in the Athenæum on Pulci with Hunt’s translation [3] —all wrong—“che non si sente”, being—“that one does not hear him” i.e. the ordinarily noisy fellow—and the rest, male, pessime! [4] Sic verte, meo periculo, mî ocelle! [5]
Where’s Luigi Pulci, that one don’t the man see?
He just now yonder in the copse has “gone it” (n’andò)
Because across his mind there came a fancy;
He’ll wish to fancify, perhaps, a sonnet!
Now Ba thinks nothing can be worse than that! Then read this which I really told Hunt and got his praise for[.] —Poor dear wonderful persecuted Pietro d’Abano [6] wrote this quatrain on the people’s plaguing him about his mathematical studies and wanting to burn him—he helped to build Padua Cathedral, wrote a Treatise on Magic still extant, and passes for a conjuror in his country to this day—when there is a storm the mothers tell the children that he is in the air; his pact with the evil one obliged him to drink no milk; no natural human food! You know Tieck’s novel about him? [7] Well, this quatrain is said, I believe truly, to have been discovered in a well near Padua some fifty years ago.
Studiando le mie cifre, col compasso
Rilevo, che presto sarò sotterra–
Perchè del mio saper si fa gran chiasso,
E gl’ignoranti m’hanno mosso guerra. [8]
Affecting, is it not, in its simple, childlike plaining? Now so, if I remember, I turned it—word for word.
Studying my ciphers, with the compass
I reckon—who soon shall be below ground,
Because of my lore they make great “rumpus,”
And against me war makes each dull rogue round.
Say that you forgive me to-morrow!
[Added in EBB’s hand.]
With my compass I take up my ciphers, poor scholar, Who myself shall be taken down soon under the ground ..
Since the world, at my learning, roars out in its choler,
And the blockheads have fought me all round–
Address: Miss Barrett, / 50 Wimpole St
Postmark: PD 10FN FE9 1846 B.
Docket, in EBB’s hand: 113.
Publication: RB-EBB, pp. 443–445.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Date provided by postmark.
2. “The lotos-cravings” (Euripides, The Daughters of Troy [Troades], 439, trans. Arthur S. Way).
3. In a “Second Notice” of Leigh Hunt’s Stories from the Italian Poets: with Lives of the Writers (1846) in The Athenæum of 7 February 1846 (no. 954, pp. 147–148), the following lines from “La Caccia col Falcone” by Lorenzo de’ Medici were reprinted with Leigh Hunt’s translation:
“‘Luigi Pulci ov’è, che non si sente?’
‘Egli se n’andò dianzi in quel boschetto,
Che qualche fantasia ha per la mente;
Vorr à fantasticar forse un sonetto.’”
“And where’s Luigi Pulci? I saw him.”
“Oh, in the wood there. Gone, depend upon it,
To vent some fancy in his brain—some whim,
That will not let him rest till it’s a sonnet.”
4. “Bad, very bad.”
5. “Translate thus, on my responsibility, my little eye!” See letter 2145 in which RB previously used the epithet “little eye.”
6. Pietro d’Abano (ca. 1250–1316), known as Petrus de Apono or Aponensis, was a philosopher and physician, and a founder of Padua’s medical school. He was summoned before the Inquisition on two occasions, but died before his second trial.
7. Johann Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), German novelist, playwright, poet, and translator. “Pietro D’Abano: A Tale of Enchantment,” a translation of his Pietro von Abano oder Petrus Apone (1825) was published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine of August 1839.
8. RB included this quatrain in a note to “Pietro of Abano,” the fourth poem in the second series of Dramatic Idyls (1880), with a similar translation. In a letter to F.J. Furnivall on 21 October 1881, RB attributed it to “pure fun of Father Prout’s [Francis Sylvester Mahony, 1804–66]. I told him of the thing in Florence, and did it impromptu.” A slightly different translation appeared in the preface to the second edition of The Reliques of Father Prout (1870), in which Mahony explained that “the poet Browning has sent for this edition some lines lately found in the Euganeian hills, traced on a marble slab that covered the bones of Pietro di Abano” (p. iv).
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