645. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 49–50.
50 Wimpole Street
June 21st Thursday. [1838] [1]
My dear friend,
Notwithstanding this silence so ungrateful in appearance, I thank you at last & very sincerely for your kind letter. It made me laugh, & amused me—& gratified me besides. Certainly your “quality of mercy is not strained”. [2]
My reason for not writing more immediately, is, that Arabel has meant day after day to go to you, & has had a separate disappointment for every day. She says now, “Indeed I hope to see Mr Boyd tomorrow.” But I say that I will not keep this answer of mine to run the risk of another day’s contingencies—& that it shall go, whether she does or not.
I am better a great deal than I was last week, & have been allowed by Dr Chambers to come down stairs again, & occupy my old place on the sofa. My health remains however in what I cannot help considering myself, & in what I believe Dr Chambers considers a very precarious state—& my weakness increases of course under the remedies which successive attacks render necessary. Dr Chambers deserves my confidence—& besides the skill with which he has met the different modifications of the complaint, I am grateful to him for a feeling & a sympathy which are certainly rare in such of his profession as have their attention diverted, as his must be, by an immense practice, to fifty objects in a day. But notwithstanding all, one breath of the east wind undoes whatever he labours to do. It is well to look up & remember that in the eternal reality, these second causes are no causes at all.
Dont leave this note about for Arabel to see. I am anxious not to alarm her, or any one of my family,—and it may please God to make me as well & strong again as ever– And indeed I am twice as well this week as I was, last.
Your affectionate friend,
dear Mr Boyd,
E B Barrett.
I have seen an extract from a private letter of Mr Chorley editor of the Athenæum, which speaks huge praises of my poems. If he were to say a tithe of them in print it wd be nine times above my expectation! [3]
Address, on integral page: H S Boyd Esqr / 3. Circus Road / St John’s Wood.
Publication: LEBB, I, 70–72.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by the reference to EBB’s health, and the fact that 21 June fell on a Thursday in 1838.
2. The Merchant of Venice, IV, 1, 184.
3. Chorley did, in fact, commit his praises to print in The Athenæum (7 July 1838, pp. 466–468). (For the text of his review, see pp. 375–378.)
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