1098. EBB to Richard Hengist Horne
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 6, 239–241.
[London]
Dec– 26– 1842–
My dear Mr Horne, while you are “screaming” & I am teazing, we must really be most agreeable company. When you are better you will tell me, I hope, whereabouts you are in the quarterly, [1] & will bear to hear me rejoice in your Euthanasia. [2] Oh that it were not a fragment! or that I had the contextuality thereof
Sinking in capacious rest
As a bird fills up its nest–
Beautiful, beautiful! you are a true poet, Mr Horne .. & happily you are not a physician! I disown your philosophy though it be Platonic. I hope you have the theory of it all to yourself! There are only two cases in which I conceive the practice of it to be pardonnable [sic] .. one, the last stage of hydrophobic madness—& the other, such a chronic algia [3] of the Moral sense as is discoverable in the Prospectus you sent me. [4] What! Is God’s wisdom a name? Is our belief in it less than a name?– Can we not trust His providence & be led by His hand, faltering down the last steps of life?
For the rest I never talk blasphemies against “opiate-trances,” having an honest pleasure of my own in them as long as they are not unto death. [5]
The church, the church!– The absolute absurdity & impiety of talking of the church of England as the church in the prospectus of a work which implies the existence of Europe & America, wd be ludicrous if it were not most melancholy. Thus it is, that the great ‘all hail’ [6] of Christianity is cast out of literature & poetry, because it is first desecrated by the barbarous provincial aspirate & intonation of this sectarianism! It makes me sick & weary to think of it– I wonder sometimes if the gospel of John & the memory of the Saviour Christ can be in the world!–
Whenever you have done screaming & can write to me dear Mr Horne, by grace of Miss Pardoe & with no inconvenience to yourself, I beg you to give me your advice. I wish to publish a volume of miscellaneous poems––a volume of some two hundred pages perhaps, more or less, & rather more than less. Would anybody, do you think, take my copyright without being paid for it? “O times & customs” [7] —it is enough to make one quote latin to have to ask such questions! Who is the most poetical bookseller of yr acquaintance? What is the least worse thing to do?
I return Euthanasia [8] as you command.
Ever yours
EBB–
Address: R H Horne Esqre / 36– New Broad Street / City.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: R.H. Taylor Collection.
1. Presumably his article in The Church of England Quarterly Review on Albertus Magnus (see letter 1116).
2. See note 8 below.
3. “Pain.”
4. We have been unable to find any trace of this prospectus; nothing dating to this period is listed in The Euthanasia Controversy 1812–1974: A Bibliography (C.W. & D.S. Triche, 1975) or under the heading of euthanasia in R.A. Peddie’s Subject Index of Books Published Up To and Including 1880 (1962).
5. Numbers, 35:25.
6. III Henry VI, V, 7, 34.
7. Cicero, In Catilinam, I, ii, 1. EBB’s query relates to Poems (1844).
8. Buxton Forman made the following transcript of the enclosure, since lost; it was not printed in The Church of England Quarterly and we have not located publication of it elsewhere.
Euthanasia
x x x x x x x x x
Physician! strong of mind as tender hearted,
Let not the body ere its soul hath parted,
Linger in agony, and at death’s porches
Reel blind, with frantic arms that toss like torches!
But, when its final hours are come,
Lull all its being for the tomb,
And let a gentle opiate-trance
Prelude the long dream’s cold romance;
So that no pangs the sense invest,
Sinking in capacious rest,
As a bird fills up its nest;
And, absorb’d, ray after ray,
As night steals, mingling, over day,
Flowing melt, and melting fade,
Soft as autumn-evening’s shade,––
The last that quivers o’er the spray.
x x x x x x x x
___________________
