2374. EBB to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 12, 345–346.
[London]
Thursday. [21 May 1846] [1]
This is not to be called a letter, please to understand, because to write a letter to you once a day is enough in all reason. But I want to send you the review you asked for at the same time with the drawings [2] which I kept too long I thought months ago,—but I have looked over them again & again. Then there is the book on Junius—& lastly, the song which I want you to have .. the Toll Slowly .. that is my gift to you, for as much as it is worth, & not to be sent back to me if you please. As for the Notes on Naples, [3] I shall keep them for the present, having need to study about Amalfi.
Now I am going out in the carriage, & shall drive round the park perhaps. You will not think much of the music—but it being the first music I had heard for years & years, & in itself so overwhelmingly melancholy, it affected me so that I should scarcely hear it to the end. I went down stairs on purpose to hear it & be able to thank the composer rightly. But she has done better things, I am sure.
Your own
Ba
Observe—I disobey in nothing by sending this parcel. There is too much for you to carry. Dont forget to bring me my ‘Statesmen’ [4] which is a lawful burden.
Address: Robert Browning Esqre.
Postmark: None. Letter was sent with a package of reviews and drawings under a separate cover sheet.
Dockets, in RB’s hand: 180. [5] ; + Saturday, May 23. / 3–5¾. p.m. (66.) [sic, for 67].
Publication: RB-EBB, pp. 721–722.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by EBB’s reference in the following letter to the review that she is sending with this letter.
2. Presumably the drawings by RB’s father; see letters 2178 and 2185.
3. An inscribed copy from Procter to RB of Notes on Naples and Its Environs (1838) was sold as lot 956 in Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, A1759). Perhaps a copy of The Claims of Sir Philip Francis to the Authorship of Junius’s Letters Disproved, etc. (1828) by Edmund Henry Barker; it sold as lot 367 in Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, A160). “Toll Slowly” is an 1846 musical setting of EBB’s “Rhyme of the Duchess May” by Harriet Hughes (née Browne, d. 1858).
4. A reference to Lives of Eminent British Statesmen (7 vols., 1831–39), specifically volume 2, which was contributed by Forster (as were volumes 3, 4, 6, and 7) and consisted of two biographies entitled “Sir John Eliot” and “Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford”; the latter was completed with considerable help from RB. The seven volumes of Statesmen were part of Dionysius Lardner’s The Cabinet Cyclopedia (133 vols., 1830–49). Forster’s inscribed copy to RB formed part of lot 692 in Browning Collections (see Reconstruction, A984).
5. As letter 2378 demonstrates, RB’s numbering is correct; he received this note after letter 2375.
___________________
