Correspondence

359.  EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 2, 222–224.

[Hope End]

Monday. [Docket: November 1829]

My dear Mr Boyd,

I have waited for two things in order to write to you: for another number of the Gleaner, & for an opportunity of returning your book. Otherwise I would have thanked you before now for sending me the verses which amused me & the criticism which surprised me so much. The verses are clever, & particularly happy towards the end. I dont like one line where there is an unusual transposition. I think that inversions, which give a rigid & studied appearance to the diction, should be avoided in familiar compositions,—and that the language should be natural where the thoughts are unelevated. I hope you have not published these verses in the streets of Askelon! [1] Let me entreat you not to do it, if you have not already. If I had not thought that some circumstances were altogether unworthy of one angry reflection of yours, I would not talked to you about them. It was very wrong of me, I believe.

The last line which went from me to you was written in such a hurry that I quite forgot to tell you that the stanzas in the Gleaner, called the Hour of Prayer, were contributed by Lady Margaret Cocks. You cannot imagine how you astonished me by saying what you did of my poem. I was resigned to the opinion that you would dislike & condemn it on account of the measure & the t-h’s; & this made me less in a hurry about procuring & sending it to you. The measure is my own transposition of a measure, invented I believe by Barry Cornwall, [2] which the Edinburgh Reviewers hallucinated from their usual orbit of defective poetical taste, in order to praise. You who move in a very different orbit, yet surprised me by liking the measure: because I have been used to fancy that you were apt to dislike new measures, to which your ear was unaccustomed & your associations untrained!

I send you the July Gleaner, & my unapplied wisdom in it. [3] I also send an old magazine containing some stanzas of mine, written, when I was fourteen, upon the palm which I wanted to give you the other day, [4] & about which you sent me such a cold-blooded message. Pray observe how differently I felt—how I made my verses “lash” & “flash” & “crash”—(dont say anything about trash)—& filled them with O’s enough to furnish a parallel scene to the last in Tom Thumb. Do not think of reading these things till you feel quite inclined; & if you should not be inclined to write to me, pray do not.

<…> [5]

Tell Mrs Boyd with my love, that Ann is quite well, growing fatter I think every day,—and I am sure, giving a great deal of pleasure. [6] My hopes lead me to dwell on the idea that Papa will not go after all; at least not for some time.

Believe me dear Mr Boyd,

Your ever sincere friend

E B Barrett.

I have written in your book as you desired, & what you desired.

Address, on integral page: Hugh Stuart Boyd Esqr

Docket, in unidentified hand: Novr 1829.

Publication: EBB-HSB, pp. 77–79.

Manuscript: Wellesley College.

1. “Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon, lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice” (II Samuel, 1:20).

2. Pseudonym of Bryan Waller Procter (1787–1874).

3. This discloses a much earlier date for the first publication of “Wisdom Unapplied” than that previously accepted; Warner Barnes’s Bibliography contains no contributions to The Gleaner, and gives first publication of “Wisdom Unapplied” as October 1845, in Christian Mother’s Magazine. In view of this, it is particularly regrettable that we have been unable to locate copies of The Gleaner to study EBB’s text, and to comment on Lady Margaret’s contribution, mentioned above.

A manuscript version of “Wisdom Unapplied,” dated 1829 and consisting of 12 4-line stanzas, exists (see Reconstruction, D1118), and was, presumably, the basis for the published text.

4. “Thoughts Awakened by Contemplating a Piece of the Palm Which Grows on the Summit of the Acropolis at Athens,” The New Monthly Magazine, II (2nd series), no. VII, p. 59 (July 1821). Reprinted in HUP, II, 31.

5. Nearly two lines were obliterated by EBB with her characteristic loops. Reconstruction is impossible.

6. Annie Boyd’s second visit to Hope End terminated early in December. Samuel Moulton-Barrett wrote to his sister Henrietta on 8 December (SD712), saying “I heard yesterday that Miss Boyd had left you.”

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