Correspondence

424.  EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 2, 319–321.

Hope End.

Sunday Evening. [17 July 1831] [1]

Were you very angry with me for forgetting to tell Mr Spowers about the newspaper? [2] If you were, you have your revenge: for I was very angry with myself, & would have turned back as soon as I thought of my forgetfulness, if I had not also thought that by the time I had driven two miles,—you would most probably have employed somebody else to deliver the message. It is not a usual fault in me, to forget anything you tell me.

I have both written & spoken to Eliza Cliffe about the chapel, & she & Mrs Cliffe will go. As for ourselves, we are all going, if it should be fine externally & internally. There was no letter yesterday, & is none today: and no advertisement. Now if you were a professor of Lagoda [sic], how many “sunbeams” could you extract from these “cucumbers”? [3]

I thunderstruck Bro & all of them with the Homer; [4] and I am thinking of raising a supply for the Greeks by making a show of it—admittance half a crown. Dont you think that I should soon have the Græcian boundaries extended & fixed,—and make Prince Leopold wish in his heart that he had taken the first crown offered to him, instead of the second? [5]

I know I did not say half I ought to have said to you yesterday,—I mean, not half I felt. I will not try to say it now. But even at the risk of appearing ungrateful, I must say one thing—that I am sorry you should have thought of making me so costly a present. Was it not quite uncalled for, & unnecessary? Was it likely that I should require a present of any kind from you,—particularly after you had made me so many? And even if it were, do you not know that if you had given me something not valuable in itself, it would have been at least as valuable to me, as Wolf’s Homer,—had Wolf’s Homer been given to me by some other person?– Therefore you would have acted more politicly & prudently if you had kept your costly presents for people, to whom your presents are not valuable unless they are costly.

After all these wise reflections, you must know very well how proud I am about the cause of them,—& how much I shall value it, both per se and pro te. And after all my “sorrow,” I am pleased,—in associating the most beautiful book I ever saw, with the kindest & most valued friend I ever had.

Yours affectionately

E B Barrett.

Give my love to Mrs Boyd.

Publication: Diary, pp. 279–280.

Manuscript: Wellesley College.

1. Dated by Diary, pp. 59–60, entry for 17 July.

2. Boyd had asked EBB to ask Spowers to take the newspaper and read it to him (Diary, p. 59).

3. One of the “projectors” in the academy of Lagado “had been eight Years upon a Project for extracting Sun-Beams out of Cucumbers, which were to be put into Vials hermetically sealed, and let out to Warm the Air in raw inclement Summers” (Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, 1726, III, 5).

4. Friedrich Augustus Wolf, ed. Homeri et Homeridarum Opera et Reliquiæ (1806). Boyd had presented this edition to EBB on 16 July (see Diary, pp. 56–58). It sold as lot 755 in Browning Collections (Reconstruction, A1208).

5. Prince Leopold had been elected King of the Belgians on 4 June 1831, having first declined the crown of Greece.

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