944. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 312–316.
[London]
April 13. 1842
My beloved friend you grieve me by what you describe as your situation. It is most touching in description—it must be most painful in endurance—& oh—be sure of my sympathy. But the spring, the spring!– I look forward beyond these east winds which are depressive to the spirits of ill health & debility to an extent unguessed by those not personally sufferers,—to the hopeful & cheerful influence of sunshine & green leaves. He will be better then I think– I hope & pray that he may. In the meantime try to hold fast the conviction that the despondency is “all desease” [1] at all times—& that if the desease were more of a fatal character the patient would probably be less apprehensive & cast down than you see him now.
As for myself—wistfully as I have looked & dreamed for the spring in two senses (with the metaphysical sense turned uppermost) much & earnestly as I longed to look at your dearest face at the time your goodness fixed for its orient—still—do not think of me—still help me not to think of me my beloved friend—& be very sure that I cd not wish you even to be here if you were uneasy either before or after or at the time of such an arrangement. I quite see now that you cannot come now– We must wait.
When the sunshine is settled, & the spirits follow the example of the sun & shine .. why then we may begin to talk again of it—or at least you will begin to talk of what becomes a possible subject to you. And I will not teaze you in the meanwhile more than appertaineth to mortality.
Dear Mr Kenyon lent me Wordsworth’s new volume two days ago [2] —& I have read the last line & end gratefully to the poet. The tragedy fails, to my apprehension—fails utterly as a whole, yet has more dramatic feature occasionally than I had expected to find. There are also fine things in it here & there which are not dramatic but which we have not force (overborne by the beauty) to wish away. The old man left to starve, reminds me of a position in Schiller, but falls short. [3] It is not [4] a fine tragedy—altho’ having hear<d> no single opinion except this of my own, .. I ought not to thunder it so emphatically. But to my mind it is not [4] —even while that same mind vibrates sensitively to the much beauty contained in it.
Among the other poems there are some four or five sonnets which are supremely excellent—most noble & beautiful—most instinct with Wordsworth in his full, great, divine life—& the poems on the Clouds, on the Widow of Windermere are fine also. And there is a ballad on a “Norman boy” which I like—& other things. The clay however lies thickly & heavily around the brightness of the diamonds—and we have to work hard to get at them. Those sonnets in favor of the punishment of death, which appeared first by grace of the Quarterly & Mr Taylor, grind harshly on my idea of the office of the poet & the tender-heartedness of this poet. [5] And I do not like very much better (altho’ much) the Puseyite note towards the close of all. [6]
You relieved me my beloved & kindest friend by what you said .... of the queen! I had inferred after my illogical fashion, from the previous saying, that some idol of mine with a crowned head like Wordsworth rather than Victoria, had scorned me from the heights of his regality. [7] Now .. if it is only Victoria .. why I peradventure can be regal too. My dearest friend, I never had a thought until you put it into me that she wd look at verses of mine, or that looking I shd ever be aware that she did. [8] Many probabilities were against the former,—all etiquettes against the latter!. & after all your pleadings on the other side, I by no means feel aggrieved, to the breadth of this line ________ which my bad pen (by the way) has made broader than my bad temper desired to do—by the quodlibets [9] of queenhood.
But if I had learnt from you that someone near the sphere of Wordsworth (not Wordsworth himself because I have heard otherwise of his kind thoughts but some one near his sphere) had been punishing me with “hard thoughts” [10] .. why then perhaps after I had thanked you for your candor my beloved friend .. perhaps, nay, certainly, I shd have sighed very heavily the next minute & felt very very sorry.
Your remarks on Anna Seward’s Letters water them to my recollection—& they are all up & green & fresh, just like mustard & cress. Your remarks run like water from a fountain—which is properly called ‘living water[’] [11] —& I hear your own living personal voice in them all. No! not a bit like! You like Miss Seward! No! not a bit– We will except the filial devotion, the perversity of over-estimating friends, the love of truth, the fervidness in all things—make those exceptions & there is not a bit of likeness remaining. And even in those exceptions you must except much—for you are after all a daughter, a friend, an enthusiast, in a different way from the sentimentalist of Lichfield—without the self-consciousness & without the ornateness of phraseology. Your’s my beloved friend is a free as well as a noble nature—& it is not necessary for you to elaborate your attitudes to attain your gracefulness—nay, it is not possible to you, through your gracefulness, to elaborate your attitudes—for that is the right manner of putting it. She was certainly in love with Mr Saville. She was perhaps ornately mournful in her lamentation for “my Honora”. [12] There now! You have done it! I am quite ashamed of myself for my maliciousness—but it is all your fault. And you will finish by forcing me to dislike this Anna Seward whom I have had a liking for all my life, & only by saying that she is like you! Like you! Is’nt it enough to make anyone who knows you, stone her with stones out of their own hearts, in utter jealousy & malice?
You sent me Miss Anderdon’s letter with your writing crossing its ends—& so I hope you dont mean me to send it back to you. I shall keep it safe for the dear autograph’s sake, unless you say “No, you shant”.
I have written you a short dull exchange for your delightful letter—but my hand has begun aching before its time .. I am physically tired—not otherwise, you know! It is the east wind—I think it must be.
My dearest friend, I maintain that your eyes are not growing weaker through age—that is my position; but is natural enough that they shd bear their part in the agitation & weariness to which your whole frame has been lately subjected.
You shall have the account of Williams the missionary—tomorrow if possible .. & I save the opportunity by venturing to send you “mine oysters” [13] again.
My love to your poor invalid. God bless you ever & ever.
Your own EBB.
You who are fond of likenesses—can you make out a likeness between Mrs Thrale & you? Not a perfect similitude, I grant you, but I stand on my ground for more points of approximation than exist between yourself & the ephemeral muse of ‘Lichfield town’. The abandon is very like—taken apart from the lightness. Altogether I cd make a better case of my suggestion than you cd of your’s–
Have you heard how the queen subsides before the tories [14] —whether she subsides at all—how she treats them—how she bears up under the circumstances—whether she cares enough for certain opinions to bear up in the strict sense, in any manner? Do tell me if you hear.
Send me too (pity the sorrows of a blind idle person!) [15] Mr Harrison’s direction. [16] I know it is safe in one of your letters, but I search & re-search again vainly. I am ashamed of the pamphlet’s remaining still ‘to be sent’. [17]
Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 393–396.
Manuscript: Folger Shakespeare Library and Wellesley College.
1. Cf. Deuteronomy, 28:60.
2. See note 1 to the previous letter.
3. EBB apparently sees parallels between Old Herbert in “The Borderers” and Old Moor in Die Räuber.
4. Underscored three times.
5. “Sonnets Upon the Punishment of Death,” advocating capital punishment, appeared on pp. 166–179 of Wordsworth’s Poems. They had been printed previously in an article on his sonnets in The Quarterly Review of December 1841 (pp. 1–51). However, EBB is mistaken in associating their publication with Taylor, who was on the staff of The Athenæum. The editor of The Quarterly Review at this time was Lockhart.
6. In a note to “Musings Near Aquapendente” on p. 402 of Poems, Wordsworth speaks of “the religious movement that, since the composition of these verses in 1837, has made itself felt … throughout the English Church;—a movement that takes, for its first principle, a devout deference to the voice of Christian antiquity.” He speaks of his own “repugnance to the spirit and system of Romanism” and says he draws “cheerful auguries for the English Church from this movement.”
7. Miss Mitford had apparently clarified an earlier reference, deemed by EBB “a mystic phrase” in letter 941.
8. EBB refers, in letter 735, to a proposal by Miss Mitford to use the offices of her friend Marianne Skerrett to bring “The Crowned and Wedded Queen” to Victoria’s attention.
9. “What pleases, or is agreeable to.”
10. As You Like It, I, 2, 183–184.
11. John, 4:10.
12. Anna Seward spoke of John Saville, eight years her senior, as her “almost next-door neighbor” and admitted that, since making his acquaintance in her twelfth year, her “esteem and friendship for him have never known abatement.” A most devoted regard for Saville, her “soul’s chosen friend,” is expressed in her letters, even though he had a wife (from whom he was separated) and daughter. Honora Sneyd, after the death of her mother, had lived in the Seward household for 14 years, and Miss Seward “had trained up the little girl with devoted care … had made her a constant and intimate companion … That she should have felt the pangs of separation upon the marriage of the younger girl is not unnatural. But her poems and letters reveal a degree of grief and misery which is accounted for only by a sense of total estrangement and loss.” (See The Singing Swan: An Account of Anna Seward and Her Acquaintance …, by Margaret Ashmun, 1931, pp. 58–63 and 178–187.)
13. Cf. The Merry Wives of Windsor, II, 2, 3. For “the account of Williams the missionary” see letter 946.
14. At the time of Victoria’s accession, a Whig ministry was in power under Melbourne, who tactfully tutored the young Queen on her duties. A mutual affection and regard developed between them, and Victoria deplored the necessary withdrawal of his solicitude and advice when a Tory administration, under Peel, supplanted Melbourne’s in 1841.
15. Cf. “The Beggar’s Petition,” line 1 (Poems on Several Occasions, 1769), by Thomas Moss (d. 1808).
16. The Rev. John Harrison, the father of Miss Mitford’s correspondent Henrietta Harrison, later Mrs. Acton Tindal.
17. Presumably the pamphlet borrowed by Miss Mitford from Miss Harrison (see SD1171).
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