974. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 10–13.
[London]
June 13. 1842.
Thank you my dearest dearest friend for your travelling garden of delight! the sight of which made me both grateful & regretful that you shd have pleased me at such a cost to your treasure house. Oh the beautiful beautiful flowers! carrying the idea of dew upon them at the very least, & the essence of the sunlight in their gorgeous colours! Thank you for them!—thank you for the thoughts which came with them! thank you for the vision of you among the leaves! And if you did not come yourself with the geraniums as I have refreshed myself so long with the odour of hoping––why still I must & shall be strong to hope on to another division of the future, that before the summer blossoming is all quite done, I may see your dearest face not by vision but by sight.
Flushie leapt up at the flowers! I never have flowers without giving him one at least! Even when you send me violets in a letter I give one to Flushie! Having been with you he is fond of flowers, leaps up at the sight of them, stands on his hind legs at a tableside if he catches a glimpse of them in a glass, & so standing, smells round & round it as if as curious in odours as the goddess Flora herself. He is comparative too & distinctive in his tastes—& liking a rose, much, prefers a geranium or even a carnation or pink—but I am sorry to say that after the process of smelling is quite over, he completes the expression of his floral affections by tearing up the flower into atoms between his teeth & paws. Pretty white little teeth, Flushie has! He likes you to admire his teeth—& holds his head “all on one side” to give you every facility.
Mr Kenyon was here yesterday, & wished that you could see Flushie & me together,—to satisfy you of the wise kindness of your gift. “Oh I wish she could see what a pleasure he is to you!”. Oh I wish she could. I say so too!–
His letter I return to you with thanks for letting me look at it—& between us, it did make me sigh even while it made me smile. Did I ever seem to half disbelieve you as to the unavailingness & pressure of vacancy incident to our dear friend’s manner of living? Well! it was then but seeming! Nobody can feel the truth of your feeling more entirely than I do & have done, almost ever since the first day I began to know him. He lives the surface of life: & the glare & the crowd & the eternal conversation without communion, I lament exactly in proportion to the degree in which I admire & esteem him. He might have done more in literature under other circumstances: he might have enjoyed more loved more thought more—& more upwardly. At the same time I never cd wish him to be a mere country gentleman,—farming, shooting, & abstruse upon the corn laws. I who am perverse as he says himself, obstinate as you confess me in the recesses of your soul, & not holding your creed of the necessary wickedness of pen & ink people, cannot wish him beyond reach of literary society. But the lion & lioness system which he bends to, something too much,—& the whirl, monotonous in the end as still life, yet destructive of all thought which will not grow rolling .. that is, what I do, with you, so deeply & inwardly deprecate. & [1] I am the more angry with it that it interrupts, whether justly or unjustly, the pleasant flow of my own personal feeling towards this dear kind Mr Kenyon. I admire & like him, yes, & regard him too, very very much—but I recoil sometimes,—& I cant make it out in my head, how anybody in the world,—even he,—who knows & cares for & talks to everybody in the world, can care much & lastingly for … me for instance! Do you ever think such a thought? Such a disagreeable thought it is—coming just at the wrong moment when one is receiving all sorts of kindness & overflowing with the kindliness born of it: the thought—“all this is very pleasant & very sincere as long as it lasts!—and it lasts I suppose as long as one is in sight!”. [2]
Oh ungrateful—selfconsciousness in a new form!! Is it so? is it wrong or .. only human? If it is at all well founded, why there is a sufficient reason for our malignities against the sort of life which renders it so: for certainly, there cannot be a more delightful companionship—brilliant yet not too brilliant,—with the kindness rising to the highest level of the talent .. & the taste & tact, .. the sensibility in fact, so heightening & softening all—than the companionship of this same dear friend of ours. He came here on saturday & on sunday too—& found me positively lying on the floor .. in search of a little coolness. The sofa took away my breath, said my fancy! & so I had the cushions thrown out of it & took ‘the lowest place’ [3] upon them. Well—& he made me forget the heat, & was very delightful & kind. And here am I writing a criticism upon him,—dear Mr Kenyon!—out of gratitude I suppose.
The intense heat, there is no describing to you my beloved friend! You in the shadows of your lovely garden, whose picture in your letter refreshed my eyes, are happily incredulous of our cinders-&-ashes-estate. I like London—you shant talk me out of liking it—“this citie of London” says brave old Chaucer “that is to mee so dere & swete”! [4] I have suffered so much out of it & had such comfort in coming back, & this room is so silent, so silent,—& we are so all together, .. that it wd be an effort & a grief to me to leave it! Dear red burning furnace of a place!– In the meantime,—at least last night, the thermometer stood at eighty: I lie gasping. If it shd grow any hotter we shall all be heaps of ashes & you may come & sweep us up.
I go a great way with you in your admiration of Fletcher—but not quite the whole way—because I cant go past Shakespeare. Dearest friend, you will find many places in my papers [5] where I shall be convicted in your eyes of total wrongness; & I beseech you if you manage to get through with the reading, to tell me of the most faulty faults—the good to me of that kindness on your part, not being confined to these papers.
Your story of Dr Valpy made me laugh! [6] I am glad you thought me right about the versification. You see I go even beyond Mr Horne in theory—altho’ inferentially & practically nobody could do so. [7] May God bless you– Really the weather’s oppressiveness lies heavy upon head & hand. More stupidly but ever & ever as affectionately
your EBB–
Publication: EBB-MRM, I, 423–425.
Manuscript: Folger Shakespeare Library and Wellesley College.
1. EBB has added the ampersand without changing the punctuation.
2. An uncharacteristically faulty judgement by EBB, in view of Kenyon’s later financial support of, and bequests to, EBB and RB.
3. Cf. All’s Well That Ends Well, II, 3, 125.
4. The Testament of Love, bk. 1, ch. 6, 97–98. In all editions of Chaucer published in EBB’s lifetime, this work was ascribed to him. Since 1866, it is considered to have been the work of Thomas Usk (d. 1388).
5. i.e., those on The Book of the Poets.
6. Richard Valpy (1754–1836) was appointed headmaster of Reading School in 1781; despite having “the reputation of being one of the hardest floggers of his day” he “inspired his pupils with an intense personal affection” (DNB). He published a number of school textbooks and adapted several English, Latin and Greek plays for performance by his scholars. One of his sons was Abraham John Valpy, the publisher; another son succeeded him in 1830 as headmaster. After his death, Miss Mitford memorialized him in Lady Mary Fox’s Friendly Contributions, for the Benefit of Three Infant Schools (1836, pp. 271–275).
7. Horne and EBB had had some disagreements on this subject (see, for example, the postscript to letter 780). He later discussed rhymes and versification in the third of four papers in The Contemporary Review dealing with his correspondence with EBB (December 1873–April 1874, pp. 146–161; 281–302; 447–461 and 799–813). While admitting his own “liberalities,” he felt that “some line of demarcation should be drawn.” This line, he thought, “has been passed more boldly, defiantly, and persistently by Miss E.B. Barrett than by any other English poet.... while various unfortunate men have received the severest censure for trifling and trumpery licences … my admired correspondent has but seldom been called to account for her numerous violations of all received principles of English rhyme” (p. 451). His criticism stemmed from his having been asked by EBB to comment on “The Dead Pan,” in which he objected to “tell us” as a rhyme for “Hellas” and “golden” for “enfolding,” among others. EBB defended herself in a letter to Horne (20 June 1844) and, when “The Dead Pan” was published in Poems (1844), she retained every one of the lines he had criticized.
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