956. Mary Russell Mitford to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 334–337.
Three Mile Cross,
May 5, 1842.
Mr. Kenyon’s kind letter, my beloved love, arrived just soon enough to be answered—that is to say, to have a very long postscript appended to a very brief letter. Some friends of his have come to Silchester, and I shall go to see them to-morrow or next day. Oh, that you could be of the party! Well, in spite of the manner in which the winds have affected that dear heart, [1] I will hope that the hour may come when we shall see that lovely scene together. The poem on Silchester [2] first made Mr. Kenyon and me friends, and that friendship was the remote cause of one to me still more precious—there is one reason for loving Silchester. But the scene is itself so beautiful! Fancy a hundred acres of the highest land in the south of England, the crown of a ridge of hills, mostly covered with the richest woodland, enclosed by a wall some twenty feet high, and nearly twenty feet thick, [3] surmounted by huge pollards, high timber-trees, hedgerow shrubs (such, for instance, as fine old thorns, maple-bushes, &c.), with enormous masses of ivy, and wild service trees, and long, pendent shoots of the briar-rose hanging down the old grey, cliff-like walls. Everywhere the ground at the foot of these walls sinks down into a narrow fosse at the depth of some hundred feet, rising again on the opposite side—some part of this outer ditch being rich meadow-land—other portions in the most beautiful coppice—joining again to the other copses—on the most beautiful ascents and declivities. Nothing was ever so exquisitely mantled about. Just at one of the gates of the old city, a huge crag clothed with ivy and crowned with magnificent timber-trees, stands the pretty country church; adjoining to that an old rustic farm-house; and at a little distance, in a magnificent grove of oak-trees, the amphitheatre, with its five rows of seats still to be traced—huge elms growing on the top and sides, and the large oval space in the bottom perfectly clear, a fine level arena of smooth and verdant turf. On one side of the amphitheatre is a piece of water, dark as a mirror; another deep pool reflects the hoary walls and some noble oak-trees; and on the opposite side of the city the parsonage, a beautiful house, very large for a pastoral mansion, with its pretty grounds, sweeps away into the woodland scenery of the south side of the walls. A short avenue leads to the fine, open, breezy common, golden with furze and broom, and from that commodious upland you look down upon the hundreds, ay, thousands, of acres of the most wild and exquisite sylvan scenery. Pamber Forest is spread beneath your feet; on one side the dark fir-plantations of Mortimer Common rise over a clear little lake with its decoy and its millions of wildfowl—on the other, High Clere; the Beacon hills stretch away over the wild district of North Hampshire, where Mr. Chute’s curious old place The Vine (vide Horace Walpole), [4] and the still more remarkable moated grange of Bear [5] carry back the eye and the fancy to the days of Clarissa, and of manners and scenery more primitive still. Oh, how I should love to stand with you upon Silchester Common! Its floral beauty I have endeavoured to describe to you in my scrawl of last night—but the purity of the air, the fragrance of the budding woods, the enormous fir-plantations, the wide expanse of richly-scented, blossomed gorse, the acres of wild hyacinth and of lilies of the valley, defy all description. It must be felt. Oh, that we were there together! I so love Silchester—always loved it. Always a drive to Silchester, or ramble through the woods, was to me joy and delight, health, freedom, and happiness; and since I have learnt to think of it as a link in the chain of our friendship, I have loved it more and more. Surely a wish so ardent will one day realise itself. We shall stand together in that lily coppice, where terrace hangs over terrace crossed with its thousand trees, carpeted with its myriad flowers, vocal with the blackbird and the nightingale. Surely, surely, we shall some day go together to Silchester. You will think, my dearest, that I rave. But so well do all here know my passion for the place, that, when very ill, my poor father years ago has often said, ‘We will go to-morrow to Silchester,’ and that was a never-failing specific. Even now he goes there. It is a strange feeling that—for he himself has not my enthusiasm for the spots, and now thinks, persuades himself that it tires me, but it is a sort of imitation. He recollects my love for it, my persuasion of the good that it did always effect upon me (the benefit resulting partly from the delicious purity of the air, partly from the love), and now without the love, he, from pure imitation, persuades himself that what used to be good for me will be good for him, so (although too far, as I fairly tell him) he goes.
You are far too good, my most dearest, in what you say of my poor letters. They come from my heart, and therefore go to yours—but that is all their merit—merit to us only—to the lover and the loved. Was there enough of the honey to taste? It seemed so light that it might be all but empty. From two other ‘tastes’ of the same ‘honouring gift’ (and who should have it, if not you?) it seemed to me strongly myrtle-flavoured—tasting exactly like the scent of a bruised myrtle leaf. The most delicious honey that I ever met with came from the orange groves of Sicily, and had the exact flavour of that delicious perfume. Would the myrtle taste keep away the flies, or was it an exaggeration? [6]
Upon reading over my wretched scrawl I see that, with my usual curious infelicity, [7] I have contrived to make it appear that the one hundred acres within the walls of Silchester are partly woodland—whereas they are clear, open fields. It is the hills and declivities around that seem hewn out of some vast forest. One sweet village close by (Mortimer West End) goes straggling down one steep hill and up another—partly coppice, partly meadow, partly field—a clear bubbling brook crossing the road at the bottom, and the road itself winding and twisting, so as to give it at every step a fresh landscape. Oh, the beautiful cottages of that West End! In many of them piles of long, straight poles, and neatly arranged staves are leaning against the ends of the dwellings, giving token of the sylvan trade of the inhabitants! But for the distance from Mr. May, I should long since have coaxed my father into migrating as far towards Silchester as Mortimer End West. Only how K______ would dispense with the streets and shops of Reading I can’t tell. She is most thankful for your kind and condescending notice of her sister, who lives as lady’s maid with the Misses Pepys—Sir William Pepys’ sisters—in Bryanston Square. [8] I have a good opinion of their sense, for I find that they leave their town house in May (not letting it, but shutting it up), and resort to their country seat to stay the fine season in the pretty scenery of Kent. [9]
Did you find the leaf of the humea elegans between two leaves of Sir William’s book? [10] Did you like the scent? It is the fashion, and the plant came to me from Strathfieldsaye; the gardener there and I having a traffic in flowers. In days of yore I used to get books from the Strathfieldsaye library—Lord Rivers [11] and my father being great friends and fellow coursers. He was a man of taste, and from him I borrowed more volumes than I can recollect of French memoirs. They are delightfully amusing. I must go over them again when I have time, not from Strathfieldsaye, I doubt if the great Duke’s library be half as well furnished as was that of his predecessor, who had a noble collection of the best books—but from Sir Henry Russell, whose wife, a Frenchwoman, [12] has caused her accomplished husband to add the literature of her native country to his own.
Heaven bless you! I am tired to death, and I presume that my sleepy letter bears sufficient marks of my condition—thrice happy if it may come in aid of opium, and bring sleep to your eyelids.
. . . . . . . . .
Once again heaven bless you, my most dearest! My father sends his kindest love.
Your faithful,
M. R. Mitford.
P.S.—How is your Flushie? Mine becomes every day more and more beautiful, and more and more endearing. His little daughter Rose is the very moral of him, and another daughter (a puppy of four months old, your Flushie’s half-sister) is so much admired in Reading that she has already been stolen four times—a tribute to her merit which might be dispensed with—and her master, having upon every occasion offered ten pounds reward, it seems likely enough that she will be stolen four times more. They are a beautiful race, and that is the truth of it.
Text: L’Estrange (1), II, 66–72.
1. The italicized words were “inserted conjecturally” by L’Estrange.
2. Not traced.
3. The wall of the Roman city of Calleva Atrebatum (see letter 949, note 3).
4. In March 1793, Walpole sent a description of The Vyne to John Cowslade, tracing its history from Lord Sandys, Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII, to its acquisition by Chaloner Chute, Speaker of the House of Commons in Cromwell’s Parliament, and its descent to Walpole’s friend William John Chute (see Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W.S. Lewis, 1973, 35, 641–642). The house is now owned by the National Trust.
5. Not identified; no “moated grange of Bear” is listed in Moated Houses of England, by R. Thurston Hopkins (1935), or in the several guides to Hampshire architecture we consulted.
6. See the first paragraph of letter 954.
7. A reversal of Petronius Arbiter’s “curiosa felicitas” (Satyricon, 118, 10).
8. Sir William Weller Pepys (1778–1845), brother of the 1st Earl of Cottenham, lived with his unmarried sisters Maria Elizabeth (d. 1850) and Anne Louisa (d. 1876) at 36 Bryanston Square.
9. Robson’s Royal Court Guide for 1840 lists Sir William’s country seat as Tanbridge Court, Godstone; this is in Surrey, not Kent.
10. Presumably a book belonging to Sir William, as we have found no evidence that he himself was an author.
11. George Pitt, 2nd Baron Rivers (1751–1828) had inherited Strathfieldsaye; in 1817, the estate was purchased by Parliament for £263,000 and presented to Wellington.
12. In 1816, Sir Henry Russell (1783–1852), of Swallowfield, had taken as his second wife Marie Clotilde (d. 1872), the daughter of the Seigneur de la Motte et de la Fontaine.
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