2945. EBB to Julia Martin
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 105–106.
26 Devonshire street
Wednesday. [17 September 1851] [1]
My dearest Mrs Martin I write in haste to you to tell you some things which you should hear without delay.
After Robert’s letter to George had been sent three times to Wales & been returned twice, it reached him, and immediately upon its reaching him, (to do George justice) he wrote a kind reply to apprize us that he would be at our door the same evening. So, the night before last, he came, and we are all good friends, thank God. I tenderly love him & the rest, & must for ever deplore that such poor barriers as a pedantic pride can set up, should have interposed between long & strong & holy affections, for years. But it is past, & I have been very happy in being held in his arms again, & seen in his eyes that I was still something more to him than a stone thrown away. So, if you have thought severely of him, you & dear Mr Martin, do not any longer. Preserve your friendship for him, my dearest friends, & let all this foolish mistaken past be well-past & forgotten. I think him looking thin,—though it does not strike them so in Wimpole Street, certainly.
For the rest, the pleasantness is not on every side. It seemed to me right, notwithstanding that dear Mr Kenyon advised against it, to apprize my father of my being in England. I could not leave England without trying the possibility of his seeing me once .. of his consenting to kiss my child once. So I wrote—and Robert wrote– A manly, true, straightforward letter his was, yet in some parts so touching to me, & so generous & conciliating everywhere, that I could scarcely believe in the probability of its being read in vain. In reply he had a very violent & unsparing letter, .. with all the letters I had written to Papa through these five years, sent back unopened .. the seals unbroken. [2] What went most to my heart was, that some of the seals were black, with black-edged envelopes,—so that he might have thought my child or husband dead, yet never cared to solve the doubt by breaking the seal. He said, he regretted to have been forced to keep them by him until now, through his ignorance of where he should send them. So, there’s the end. I cannot of course write again. God takes it all into His own Hands, & I wait.
We go on tuesday. If I do not see you (as I scarcely hope to do now) it will be only a gladness delayed for a few months. We shall meet in Paris, if we live– May God bless you both, dearest friends. I think of you & love you. Dear Mr Martin, dont stay too late in England this year, for the climate seems to me worse than ever. Not that I have much cough now .. I am much better .. but the quality of the atmosphere is unmistakeable to my lungs & air passages, & I believe it will be wise, on this account, to go away quickly.
Your ever affectionate & grateful
Ba.
Publication: LEBB, II, 19–20.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by EBB’s remark: “We go on tuesday”; i.e., 23 September 1851—though in the end the Brownings did not leave for France until Thursday, 25 September.
2. In letter 2962 EBB tells Henrietta that “nine or ten” letters were returned “all with their unbroken seals.” These letters were preserved by the Brownings and later their son Pen. Upon his death, his wife Fannie took possession of them but was eventually forced to turn them over to the Moulton-Barretts, who kept them out of the 1913 Browning sale. T.J. Wise, having been shown the letters by Fannie, referred to them as “8 tiny letters, all but one still unopened.” The opened letter was presumably the one EBB had left at 50 Wimpole Street before departing England in September 1846. It is certain the letters were extant as late as 1924, at which time they may have been destroyed by EBB’s nephew Harry Peyton Moulton-Barrett, then head of the family. For a full account of their disposition, see Reconstruction, pp. xxvii–xxviii.
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