2788. Christopher Pearse Cranch to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 15, 266.
[Florence]
[late April 1849] [1]
My dear Mrs Browning
I write to ask of you a favor, but before I do so I must make a little preface.
First, be assured that I am speaking sincerely and not complimentarily, when I say that ever since I have known your Poems I have felt the deepest interest in them & in their Author– They have appealed to me as all the best Poetry has & ever will—and it is because I have never expressed as I longed to this sympathy—because in conversation we have never met on this enchanted ground, so dear to me also—& because so very soon I shall be thousands of miles distant from you—that I am emboldened to write to you now– —You bear a celebrated name, no less than your husband—& a short time ago little did I dream that I should ever be honored so far as to know you both personally. He as well as yourself has been a name of renown—in America there are many who would envy me the privilege of having known you both. Believe me that I say these things from no feeling but the love & admiration I have for your writings & his. What I say is from one who feels & loves poetry as the finest intellectual tie that can exist between men– I could not leave Florence & not strive to express what has lain so long in my heart.
You were kind in expressing so favorable an opinion of my lines on Vesuvius– [2] I have lately written something better, [3] & the request I have to make, is that you will allow me some day to read it to you, & to give me the benefit of any suggestions you may make with regard to any improvement I might make in it.
I ask it not to seek praise but candid criticism, & as it were to antedate the privileges of an acquaintance which I so much regret must end so soon. Pardon my presumption– I could not say what I have did I not feel I was addressing a Poet.
Most truly yours.
Publication: Leonora Cranch Scott, The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch, Boston, 1917, pp. 157–158.
Source: Author’s draft at Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Approximate dating suggested by reference to letter 2790 (3 May [1849]), which is a reply to this letter.
2. See letter 2781, note 2.
3. “The Bird and the Bell,” the title poem of The Bird and the Bell, with Other Poems (Boston, 1875). In a prefatory note to this volume, Cranch declares that “the reader will find in this poem allusions to events which have passed in Italy,—fluent when the lines were written, but now crystallized into history.”
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