954. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 330–333.
[London]
May 2—1842.
Your honey reached my hands late yesterday evening my beloved friend, yet too early for my will. It was so kind of you to think of making that transfer yet so wrong altogether, that my ‘no’ was ready to fly to you when the haste of your goodness intercepted the interception. What shall I say now? Nothing but an impotent ‘thank you’? ‘Sweets from the sweet’ [1] reverse equally the quotation & the proprieties by sending away Hymettus honey from you to another! [2] How kind—how wrong! How obliged I am, .. how ashamed! Do you not know how Ælian [3] writeth that the flies do not dare for their unworthiness to taste the honey from Hymettus? And your ..
“Little fly,
Drink with me & drink as I’[’] [4]
would rally (Raleigh) [5] me out of the modest traditions of his ‘Natural history.’ Must it be so really?——
I was sorry that K’s sister had the trouble of bringing the precious deposit here just at the time when Crow was out at chapel. It was sunday evening:—and the housemaid who gave me the parcel could not persuade the messenger to go to the housekeeper’s room.! I am sure Crow would have been glad to make the acquaintance of a sister of your K–
I waited & would not write on saturday because I expected Mr Kenyon in the afternoon & he did’nt come until Sunday .. & after all you will hear more satisfactorily of him from himself (he is talking of writing to you immediately) than you can do from me. On friday he sent me & lent me Mr Reade’s new poem ‘A Record of the Pyramids’, [6] & was so considerate as to stand between the author & myself & save me from the present of a copy which he did me the honor of meditating, & the very serious consequences either to my veracity or his vanity. The vanity by the way wd have suffered—if it had not taken shelter under the innocuousness generally of such a thing as an opinion of mine—since I hold fast my single point of supremacy over Walter Scott, & am resolute to speak what seems to me the truth with whatever painfulness in the utterance. [7] As to the ‘Record’ I am glorying you see in the security won for me. You will be sure to have the new poem—the new Prometheus!! a Prometheus taken out of his cloud, [8] —out of the sphere of his poetry & exhibited in a Parliamentary sort of coat & waiscoat, as a type of Sir Robert Peel!! to whom the work is dedicated. Do explain to Mrs Niven this satisfactory solution of the great riddle. And then, the preface, the preface!! He takes high ground for Poetry abstractedly, which of course is to be applauded, but when he ends all by saying ‘Here is my throne’ it spoils all too! [9] Mr Kenyon describes his personal sensitiveness & selfassurance as something wonderful—as, in fact, they appear in his books. Can he be safe in unconsciousness of the plagiarisms wherewith he has girded up his loins?– [10] It is a phenomenon in my eyes.
His friends are said to say that he has spent fifteen hundred pounds in printing & advertizing poems .. which are to be read by Prince Posterity! [11]
He loves poetry too. It is hard that he shd not be praised for loving poetry—& if he would .. if he could .. but throw off this consciousness of other poets & determine to be something else than their shadow on the wall, he might write .. not greatly I think .. but worthily. In the meantime this new Prometheus is very much past bearing. It is a desecration—a blasphemy!– [12]
Mr Kenyon talks of going in June to Torquay for a fortnight, & then to Scotland—provided he does not go to Vienna instead of either. In the latter case it will be for ‘a run’—to be accomplished at comet-pace, in eight weeks.
He was telling me of Mr Tennyson—that he is tall, pale, with black hair—looking ‘a mild brigand’—for the rest, uncomfortably shy .. quite without assumption & pleasing in many ways. A new book of poems—true poems be sure—we are to have from him soon. [13]
Think where George dined on saturday! At Mr Serjet Talfourd’s. It was a law dinner .. & no lions!
Alfred .. who had the meazles last, was pursued to the death almost, with agony in the face, & is only just emancipated from bed & bedroom—while my poor Arabel has suffered too from the common plague of swelled faces & rheumatic pains in the shoulders. She goes out today the first time for a week. My heart waxes better & worse as the wind blows,—& forced me to take wine last night, in the night, as an alternative to fainting, altho’ it beat more regularly for some previous days .. and altho’ Mr Kenyon praised the improvement he heard in my voice only yesterday. Today, he might praise me again.
Thank you .. how can I enough? for your delightful letter—the ‘sweet south’ [14] blowing from a bank of violets, being less fragrant! And you wished me with you, did you my dearest kindest friend in that walk? [15] But I walked it all over again in your footsteps, by the spell you sent me. Your delightful letter smelt of the fields—the stream ran in it—& the garden-wind blew!– For me, I leapt & walked—as if indeed I were walking with you.
Tell me, are you out in the garden room yet? Is dear Dr Mitford there?
I must write more another day.
Ever your EBB–
What a scribble! My hand does shake so!–
Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 401–404.
Manuscript: Folger Shakespeare Library and Wellesley College.
1. Cf. Hamlet, V, 1, 243.
2. Miss Mitford mentioned sending the honey in letter 951.
3. Claudius Ælianus (ca. 170–235), known as Meliglossus (“honey-tongued”), was the author of De natura animalium, a collection of anecdotes of animal life.
4. William Oldys (1696–1761), “On a Fly Drinking Out of a Cup of Ale” (first published anonymously in The Scarborough Miscellany, 1732). EBB misquotes the first two lines of the poem.
5. Oldys edited the 1736 edition of Raleigh’s History of the World, prefacing it with a 282-page “Life of the Author”; hence EBB’s pun.
6. A Record of the Pyramids: A Drama, in Ten Scenes, by John Edmund Reade (1842).
7. A reference to Scott’s volte-face regarding Miss Seward’s poetry (see letter 606, note 6).
8. Reade’s preface commences by referring to his “idea of abstracting the character of Prometheus from the grand ideal in which he lived … and bringing him within the pale of humanity … labouring for the welfare of his fellow-men … sharing their common sympathies and oppressions.”
9. Reade devotes a number of paragraphs of his preface to an expression of his view of the duties of a poet, charging him to “fulfil the impulses impregnated in him from the Ineffable Being. His, above all others, is a holy mission … to teach to each man … that he is ‘a little lower than the Angels;’ … He is the Priest of Nature, as of Humanity.”
10. I Kings, 18:46. Reade’s persistent plagiarism was the subject of comment by EBB in letters 643 and 687.
11. EBB is perhaps making an oblique reference to Peel, to whom Reade had addressed the fulsome dedication of his book; Prince Posterity was the mythical recipient of Swift’s dedication of A Tale of a Tub (1704).
12. EBB’s view is shared by the author of a savage review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (July 1842, pp. 113–119), who dismissed the work as “eight or nine thousand verses strung like empty birds’ eggs” and again made reference to Reade’s plagiarism. EBB later identified the author as Landor (see letter of 14 September 1842 to Miss Mitford).
13. A two-volume edition of Tennyson’s poems was published later in the month and was immediately sent to EBB by Kenyon (see letter 958).
15. i.e., the visit to Silchester, described in letter 949.
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