1004. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 70–71.
[London]
Thursday– [8 September 1842] [1]
You will take me for a stone as to sensibility & deservingness of your last interesting letter,—considering that, as a stone I answer nothing. No newspaper comes (how shd it, in such a seeming of silence?) & no letter—which promised to be a substitute for newspaper in the case of the latter’s falling-shortedness! and instead of all I have the fear that you may be thinking as I say, stones of me! [2]
No—no, no! my beloved friend! It has not been as you think—as I think you think. It has not been that I was not touched & raised by the just Reading enthusiasm, & touched & pleased in my secret selflove or love of you (however those two emotions may be demarcated) by your goodness & kindness in telling me a little ‘all about it’. The truth is—I have not been well; & cdnt write, & wdnt be written of. I have been unwell, what I call, incidentally, by an attack of inward cramp followed by sickness or a series of sicknesses, & attended by feverishness, & the sort of weakness which persons in general shake off so much quicker than I can now. I am well now—do not fancy otherwise; & am up on the sofa writing all this to you,—taking Flushie’s ears for my desk. The sort of attack has belonged to everybody lately, & there was no reason, you know, why it shdnt come to me.
I do not mean to write much more to you my beloved friend. I only wanted to ‘explain’ so that you need not be either anxious about me, or disgusted with me,—& that if you have the newspaper, or a moment’s time to tell me of yourself & your dear patient, in, you wd send & tell. In the meantime I promise to write more at length soon. Some hours since, I was shocked & pained by bad news from Herefordshire—of the death, not expected of an amiable young person who was our neighbour when we lived there & has since corresponded with one of my sisters [3] —so shocked & affected that it has only been with an effort that I have forced my thoughts away even to you. Oh this life—this death! this human Love which will outlast either! this Divine Love to which we go for the enigma of both!
She had been ill, my dearest friend, but was considered getting quite well—was met by George in the streets of Gloucester, on his last circuit, looking quite well—she sent me some rose-water with a kind little note only last week. And on last tuesday evening at eight—she was gone! ‘In a moment’ they say!—without sign or sickness.
Poor Charlotte Peyton! But may she be far beyond such a word as ‘poor’.
How foolish & wrong of me. I did’nt mean to say a word of dark colour to you today. I am in the dye—you see—& cannot help it.
Your own attached
EBB.
Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 26–27.
Manuscript: Folger Shakespeare Library and Wellesley College.
1. Dated by the death of Charlotte Peyton.
2. EBB is, of course, making punning references to Miss Mitford’s laying of the corner-stone on 31 August (see letter 1001).
3. The Hereford Journal of 14 September 1842 announced the death on 6 September, “suddenly, from disease of the heart, in the prime of life, Charlotte Lea, eldest daughter of the late Nicholson Peyton, Esq. of Barton Court, near Ledbury.”
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