2853. EBB to Clotilda Elizabeth Stisted
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 121–122.
Florence.
May 10– [1850] [1]
My dear Madam, [2]
I am very thankful to you and Colonel Stisted for the kindness with which you have remembered me through years, & for the regret you express at having missed us at the Baths of Lucca last summer. If we did not find you there, we found your mountains & forests. What beautiful scenery!—and how reasonably you may be attached to such a “happy valley”! [3] No wonder that the Rasselas’s of the place should come back, even when they have wandered as far away as Baden Baden. We heard you had gone there.
Most sorry I am, that you should still be an invalid. For my own part, after a long struggle between life & death, .. the influence of this Italian climate, and the happiness, you will better judge of when you come to know my husband, have proved God’s means of completely lifting me up from a dreary state of illness & depression, from which I had no hope of emerging– When I was ill, that guitar you have the goodness to remember, dropt away like the other music of life—I could scarcely whisper, much less sing, .. (through the weakness of the chest)—now, the music of life returns, & because it returns so much sweeter than ever, I dont regret the guitar, nor shall your goodness regret it for me. I am not exactly strong, of course, nor able to exert myself much, but I live again, .. and is’nt it double life, to have a little child of my own, a little Florentine, fourteen months old yesterday, & full of health & vivacity? I assure you, besides, I was able to climb some of your mountain-paths last summer–
For the coming summer, we talk of England for a short time. In any case, even the inducements you offer us, will not, I think, draw us to Lucca. But our plans are like the weather, in a mist just now, & all the drizzling does not clear them entirely.
My aunt Mrs Hedley has been for several years at Tours, and a letter will find her there. My uncle’s health improved until last summer, when he returned from a visit to England not altogether so well. She is quite well. Arabella is most happily married, and has two infants, a boy and a girl. I saw Mrs Hedley three years and a half ago, just before we came to Italy, and then she was in her old own joyousness, with the same eyes and smile you remember. There has been a question of Italy once or twice with her, but I suppose we are (or were) too revolutionary & perillous to be attractive to prudent people with families, and she seems to have given up the thought of coming to Florence.
And now, dear Mrs Stisted, let me thank you once more for bearing me in mind so kindly. It is no merit that I should not forget you .. but that is very different. By anticipation (since retrospection has done much) I will venture to send my husband’s respects & compliments to yourself & Colonel Stisted, with the cordial wishes of
your faithful, obliged
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Address: À Madame / Madme Stisted / Villa Brodrick / Bagni di Lucca.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Year provided by postmark.
2. Clotilda Elizabeth Stisted (1790–1868), daughter of Bladen Swinney, of Dublin, and his wife Catherine (née Stoney), had met EBB many years before (see letter 2647, note 3). In 1820 at Dublin, she married Captain (later Colonel) Henry Stisted (1786–1859), of the 1st Royal Dragoons. Mrs. Stisted was generally, albeit humorously, acknowledged as the “Queen” of Bagni di Lucca society (see Thomas Adolphus Trollope, What I Remember, 1887, II, 137).
3. In Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, the idyllic homeland to which the title character returns after extensive travels.
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