Correspondence

2996.  EBB & RB to Joseph Milsand

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 239.

January 16– 1853 [sic, for 1852]. [1]

Dear M. Milsand,

Will you let me thank you gratefully both for the honour you have done me in your admirable review, & for the pleasure which, in so honoring me, you have given to my husband? I desire to justify your good opinion by producing better works hereafter. It will be the worthiest apology for the faults of these.

I am full of gratitude to you in another way .. I mean for the sympathy & sensibility which saved me much pain, as my husband explained to me a few evenings since. Your consideration deeply touched me, & him for my sake,—and we both feel that, having shown us so much of your nature & mind, it will be almost ungenerous of you if you will not complete the obligation by becoming our friend in the good warm sense of that word, .. the true, enduring sense of it.

For my own part, long before you had been kind to me, I was bound to you as the critic who of all others, in or out of England, had approached my husband’s poetry in the most philosophical spirit & with the [most] ardent comprehension. [2] The justice you did to him, is even more precious in my eyes, allow me to say, than the kindness you have done to myself–

But we both are very much your debtors, and would willingly, if you will not say no, be from henceforth your friends

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

& Robert Browning. [3]

Pray remember tuesday,—when I hope to be more happy than I was last time.

Publication: Scribner’s Magazine, July 1896, p. 112 (as 16 January 1853).

Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library, Joseph Milsand Archive.

1. Year provided by reference to the return address; the only January in which the Brownings resided at 138 Avenue des Champs Élysées occurred in 1852.

2. In his review, published the previous August; see the preceding letter, note 1.

3. RB has signed his name.

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