510. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 145–147.
Sidmouth.
Friday. [ca. September 1835] [1]
My dear friend,
I dont know how I shall begin to persuade you not to be angry with me—but perhaps the best plan will be to confess as many sins as would cover this sheet of paper, & then to go on with my merits. Certainly, I am altogether guiltless of your charge of not noticing your book’s arrival because no Calvinism arrived with it. I told you the bare truth, when I told you why I did not write immediately. The passages relating to Calvinism, I certainly read, & as certainly was sorry for: but as certainly as both those certainties, such reading & such regret had nothing whatever to do with the silence which made you so angry with me.
The other particular thing of wh. I shd have written, is Mr Barker & my letters. [2] I am more & more sorry that you shd have sent them to him at all,—not that their loss is any loss to anybody, but that I scarcely like the idea—indeed I dont like it at all—of their remaining, worthless as they are, at Mr B’s mercy. As for my writing about them, I shd not be able to make up my mind to do that. You know I had nothing to do with their being sent to Mr Barker, & was indeed in complete ignorance of it. Besides, I shd be half ashamed to write to him now, on any subject. A very long interregnum took place in our correspondence; which was his own work,—and when he wrote to me the summer before last, I delayed from week to week & then from month to month, answering it. And now I feel ashamed to write at all.
Perhaps you will wonder why I am not ashamed to write to you! Indeed I have meant to do it, very very often. Dont be severe upon me. I am always afraid of writing to you too often: and so the opposite fault is apt to be run into––of writing too seldom. If that is a fault. You see my scepticism is becoming faster & faster developped!——
Let me hear from you soon, if you are not angry. I have been reading the Bridgewater treatises, [3] —and am now trying to understand Prout upon chemistry. [4] I shall be worth something at last, shall I not? Who knows but what I may die a glorious death under the pons asinorum [5] after all? Prout (if I succeed in understanding him) does not hold that matter is infinitely divisible: and so I suppose the seeds of matter—the ultimate molecules—are a kind of tertium quid [6] between matter & spirit. Certainly I cant believe that any kind of matter, primal or ultimate, can be indivisible: which it must, according to his view.
Chalmers’s treatise is, as to eloquence, surpassingly beautiful: [7] as to matter, I could not walk with him all the way—altho’ I longed to do it, for he walked on flowers, & under shade––“no tree on which a fine bird did not sit[.”] [8]
I never look at the newspapers now, but I hear that the House of Lords is dying a natural death,—in one sense at least. I hear that a reformed House of Commons, and an unreformable House of Lords cant co-exist. Papa wants to have a new House on a representative system; and I want the Lords to be content to be merged in the other House, the reformed House, & make one with the people. Of course you will agree with me. We shall be able to talk all this over, besides all the Greek, soon, I dare say. Dear Annie will have told you of the likelihood there is, of our removing to London next month. There are just two faces in London whom I shall care about seeing, exclusive of dear Annie’s; and Miss Trepsack’s is one. I will leave the other to your ingenuity to divine. How I shall ever breathe when I am walled up like a transgressing man, and out of hearing of that sea, requires a somewhat more profound divination. Χρονος μονος [9] can instruct. This sounds very much like joking, but is too sad & sober earnest after all! The next page belongs to Arabel. Dont you owe her everlasting gratitude? Is Miss Boyd still with you? Because if she is, my love shall go to her, and to dear Annie too!——
Believe me your affectionate friend
EBB.
Publication: EBB-HSB, pp. 212–214.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Written after Annie’s visit to Sidmouth, mentioned in letter 508.
2. Barker was still intent on publishing EBB’s letters to Boyd (see letter 373).
3. Francis Henry Egerton, 8th Earl of Bridgewater (1756–1829), bequeathed £8,000 for the best work on the “goodness of God as manifested in the Creation.” The sum was split among the authors of eight essays, since known as the Bridgewater Treatises.
4. The contribution of William Prout (1785–1850), physician and chemist, to the Bridgewater Treatises was Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Function of Digestion Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (1834).
5. “Bridge of asses,” from Euclid’s first difficult theorem, which many stumbled over.
6. “A third thing;” in chemistry, a new substance resulting from the union of two others.
7. The Bridgewater Treatise written by Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), theologian and philanthropist, was On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man (1833).
8. Spenser’s Faerie Queene, II, vi, 13 (slightly misquoted).
9. “Time alone.”
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