2336. RB to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 12, 288–289.
[London]
Wednesday. [Postmark: 29 April 1846]
Oh, post, post, how am I plagued by what uses to delight me! [1] No letter,—and I cannot but think you have written one, my Ba! It will come perhaps at 3 oclock. Shame, and again, shame!
Meantime I will tell you what a dear, merciful Ba you are, in only threatening me with daggers, [2] —when you play at threatening,—instead of declaring you will frown at me .. oh, but here “Fear recoils, he knows well why, even at the sound himself has made”. [3]
The best of it is, that this was the second fright, and by no means the most formidable—when I read that paragraph beginning “you need not think any more of going with me to Italy” .. shall I only say I was alarmed? Without a particle of affectation, I tell Ba, I am, cannot help being, alarmed even now—we have been discussing possibilities—and it is rather more possible & probable that Miss Bailey may “carry off” my Ba, and her Flush, and, say, an odd volume of the Cyclic Poets, [4] all in her pocket .. she being, if I remember, of the race of the Anakim [5] —than that I shall ever find in the wide world a flesh & blood woman able to bear the weight of the “feelings” I rest now upon the B and the A which spell Ba’s name,—only her name!
Forster sent a note last evening urging me to go and dine with him & Leigh Hunt to-day,—there was no refusing. There is sunshine—you may have been down stairs .. but the wind continues–
I shall know to-morrow: but surely a letter is to come presently—let me wait a little.
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Nothing! Pray write if anything have happened, my own Ba! No time–
Ever your
RB
Address: Miss Barrett, / 50. Wimpole St
Postmark: 8NT8 AP29 1846 B.
Docket, in EBB’s hand: 167.
Publication: RB-EBB, pp. 665–666.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. See docket in preceding letter.
2. Cf. Hamlet, III, 2, 396.
3. We have been unable to identify the source of this quotation.
4. Greek poets of the seventh and eighth centuries B.C. whose poems formed an epic cycle on the Trojan War. Since none of these poems has survived, their existence is known only through the works of later writers, particularly Proclus, a Neoplatonist who died in 485 A.D.
5. i.e., a giant; cf. Numbers 13:33.
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