1086. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 218–220.
[London]
Dec. 13. 1842.
I feel grateful to all the dear people, my beloved friend, who have been as you say, kind to you—& very grateful for their dissuading you from the attendance at the funeral, [1] which would have been quite too much for you even with your idea of privacy .. quite too much—likely to be altogether overcoming to you. Ah—I had feared that you would desire to do it! I am very grateful to the dissuaders—& consider that the objection as it has been represented by them & as you have regarded it, is quite weighty & unanswerable though by no means the only objection. And the full expression of public respect & affection & sympathy will be sweet to you, & will correspond to the wishes of your beloved father while they were low as the earth. Let the full sympathy have its way. And do you be tranquil, my dearest dearest friend!—& do not, even for kindness’ sake, see & talk to too many even of the most sympathizing. I am confident that you require repose chiefly. You are not stunned by a blow—as is the case sometimes, with more sudden calamities & feebler natures,—but you are over-taxed as to energies .. over-excited, over-worked. I want you to turn your face towards the reaction & meet it half way. I am frightened at your permitting one excitement to follow another,—& even if you had not told me of that risk of serious illness, I who am learned in the workings of misery, shd have trembled for your health. And why did you not tell me of the risk? How am I to be easy if you hide such things? That is being very naughty .. worse than Mdme Sand, in a rather different way. My beloved friend, when Papa came to me last night & prayed with me his usual prayer, it was not prayed in forgetfulness of you. I did not say to him, ‘Let us pray for her’: he did it out of his own mind & quite from his heart as you wd have known if you had heard—and I kissed him twice instead of once afterwards, because it touched me. During your trial he has asked of you every day. I do not show your letters—except occasionally—even to him—but he knew that I had them, & always asked, & was very grave indeed after the bad news. Indeed I must not dwell most on him: for all of them, my sisters & brothers too, put twenty questions to me after every post, & think of you with the strongest interest & solicitude.
Here too is Mr Haydon who has just written to me of you .. “Her kindness & devoted attention to her father, will be a blessing to her remembrance to the end of her life”.
As to Tennyson I feel more for him than I ever did, that his sweet piercing thoughts shd have reached you through the darkness & cloud. I feel as if I loved him for that, for which I might indeed envy him. Yes—poetry is divine. It resembles grief in rending assunder our conventionalities, .. but does so singing instead of sighing. It transfigures the great humanity into the sense of its To-come.
How wrong, critically wrong of Leigh Hunt to call Tennyson sensual. [2] It seems to me quite wrong. Take his Sleeping Beauty for an instance, & see. He has not flesh & blood enough to be sensual—his forms are too obviously on the surface to wear pulses. His representation of beauty in that poem & otherwise, is rather the fantasma of beauty, than the thing. You can no more touch or clasp it, than beauty in a dream. It is not less beautiful for that; but less sensual it is.
Yes, you like the bright & the beautiful—& I like, sometimes, things out of sight. Still it seems to me that by virtue of my mysticism & of your humanity, you shd have liked Lockesly Hall best (almost) & I the Lady of Shallot & Sleeping Beauty. But Bright & Gloom have determined it instead of Humanity & Mysticism—& so, well! He is a true poet, to be sure! I cd have written Lockesly Hall & the Two Voices!!!– Ah my dearest friend, I fear you think a whole mountain too high of me. I know, I wish I had written them. I wd rather have written them than any poem of the day—which is an answer to your question about Browning.
It seems to me—there are ‘signs in the air’ [3] —that your leaning is towards Reading: & altho’ I do not give up my point now & so, yet I am prepared to yield it in a moment to a reasonable conviction of your being probably happier there than here within reach of me. We will talk soon of it all, my beloved friend! Do not, I beseech you, vex yourself, in the meanwhile, about futurities or anything else: but repose—and trust the thoughts of your friends—& remember that “the blue sky bends over-all,” [4] and in it, that Divine Mercy which breaks trust with none.
You wd rather not, perhaps, come to London immediately. If this house were but quieter, I shd beg you to come to us. We are quiet in a manner, but cant appear so to you, being Legion [5] —and yet, how wd you feel about it? I scarcely dare to ask.
Dear, dear little Flushie! How you will love him for this! how you ought to love him! And Ben. Ben need not leave you! oh surely surely you will be able to keep Ben. And Flush! Your love to Flush is justified now to every generation of dog-haters. Tell me how he is.
May God bless you my dear dearest friend! You shall hear again from me tomorrow.
Your own
EBB–
Do speak particularly of your health!
I am so glad you have Mrs Niven.
Publication: EBB-MRM, II, 118–120.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dr. Mitford’s funeral was arranged for the 15th.
3. EBB perhaps had in mind the story of Constantine’s seeing the words “In hoc signo vinces” written in the sky (see letter 718, note 3).
4. Coleridge, Christabel (1816), line 331.
5. Cf. Mark, 5:9.
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