918. EBB to George Goodin Moulton-Barrett
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 249–250.
[London]
March 2– 1842.
My ever dearest Georgie,
I said to Papa last night– “We may hear from George tomorrow” .. that was an ebullition of good opinion of you! But “oh no” .. he said—nothing can be more unlikely. If he writes at all, he wont write tomorrow.
Thank you my dearest dearest George for the letter which came after all– If you knew how I cared to have it you wd ‘do so again’ very soon. You have only to breathe once or twice over the paper & let your hand move at the same time, & the work is done!
I feel quite triumphant about the six cases, & we are all as pleased as possible. Fortune will come if you wait long enough where the three roads meet [1] & restrain your natural discontent at the dust.
I am a chronicler with nothing to chronicle, having heard nothing, out of my own heart-beating & head-working, & that not worth repeating, since you went away. Mr Gosset [2] does not dine here today, & Papa was scarcely pleased at his being asked—“Why did George ask him when he was not here to entertain him? Certainly you could’nt have waited dinner for me. I shall not be back perhaps until half past eight.” So spake he yesterday, & Henrietta being abashed never explained how Mr Bell [3] and Mr Somebody else were coming—so there will be a delightful surprise for him at half past eight. Henry met Arabella Gosset yesterday– Of course she enquired after “dearest Ba” but notwithstanding the dearestness leaves town today without coming to Wimpole Street. I had Mr Townsend’s poem of ‘New Zealand’ yesterday too, [4] with a request that I wd dispose of a few copies, as assistant to Seely in his heavy publishing labors, & in help to the charity. Not knowing nor having access to many buyers of poems (unfortunately for myself) I shall decline the proffered occupation. I shall say “I am still busy with the Seraphim! & have’nt sold it yet by .. how many copies!”
I have no doubt that your Scotchman: your accidental Scotchman, admired you quite as much as he admired me. “Very like a whale” [5] & Carlyle indeed! I suppose Carlyle stands for an author in the far north—& that there’s an inversion in those parts of the old phrase—ex Hercule, pedem. [6] Mr Boyd approves of my first part but objects to the injustice of including Gregory & Synesius in the canaille of poets, & using one grand swoop of a they [7] to all. “My third” inclines to end itself– Shdnt you like to see the ghastly grin of enforced courtesy, with which Mr Dilke will receive the intimation of a fourth’s being necessary? I think I must propose unpaying back—i.e. the taking off of a half guinea for every supernumerary column. Everybody’s love. God bless you my own dear Georgie!
Ever your Ba
Do write.
Address: George Goodin M Barrett Esqr / [continued in Henrietta’s hand] Mr Palmer’s / Westgate St / Gloster.
Publication: B-GB, pp. 77–79.
Manuscript: Pierpont Morgan Library.
1. The junction of three roads (trivium) had a particular significance for the ancients. The Romans frequently placed there an image of Diana, portrayed with three faces, one looking along each road; in this capacity, she was known as Diana Trivia. It was also at such a meeting of the roads that Œdipus slew his father, fulfilling the first part of the fate foretold by the Delphic Oracle (see Sophocles, Œdipus Tyrannos, 707 ff. and 787 ff.).
2. Ralph Allen Gosset, married to EBB’s cousin Arabella.
3. The brother of Maria Barrett, the wife of EBB’s distant cousin, Samuel Goodin Barrett. In a letter to Henrietta, 7 January 1847, EBB wrote that he “gives up his heiress, then, and is not thinner for it” (TTUL, p. 23).
5. Hamlet, III, 2, 382.
6. The usual form is “ex pede, Herculem” (“from the foot, Hercules”). Aulus Gellius (fl. ca. 130 A.D.) described in his Noctes Atticæ (bk. I, cap. 1) how it was inferred from the size of Hercules’ footprint that he was much taller than other men; in a more general sense, the phrase signifies the deduction of the whole from a part. As George’s letter is lost to us, so too is the meaning of the reference to Carlyle, but EBB’s inversion of Gellius’s phrase gives the meaning “from Hercules, the foot.”
7. EBB has emphasized her underscoring by printing the word.
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