1279. Benjamin Robert Haydon to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 7, 179–180.
London
June 10 1843
Ah My dear Miss Barrett—you enter into the genius of the thing & your description of my Dear Mother & myself is exquisite—you shall have the rest—& you will be deeply touched—such a Death! [1] Good God after five & thirty years I start up & fancy her dear Influence now near me at this moment—her dear noble generous head, her grand nature—her ambitious urging onward to renown!—her repeated admonition to learn every thing—her devoted fidelity so ill requited by my thoughtless Father—her misery at any of my pains—her anxiety for my happiness—her utter extinction of self, dear noble Creature– I have the delight of knowing I spent my first earnings £60—to bury her where she wished at Ide, the living her Father had– [2] She was born to the grave by an old tenant, who remembered Miss Sally in her Youth! & Wept over her– Good God, all this has been out of my head for years but always in my heart—& now at midnight when I write it, I start & feel a large tear hanging & not dropping by the weight of its own intensity–
I send you the rest with equal confidence & will go on with the whole—if you think it right–
Ever & Ever Yours
B. R. Haydon
Miss B Barrett
There are moments worthy of Immortality & these are they!
Address: Miss B. Barrett / 50– Wimpole St.
Publication: EBB-BRH, pp. 112–113.
Manuscript: University of Vermont.
1. Haydon’s affecting account of his mother’s suffering from angina pectoris and her final agony and death in 1807 can be found in his autobiography (Haydon, I, 73–78).
2. “My dear mother had expressed a wish to be buried by her father’s side … I had her conveyed to Ide where my grandfather possessed property. There following the funeral at a distance I saw her carried to her vault by four old villagers, one of whom remembered Miss Cobley a healthy rosy child of ten years old” (Haydon, I, 79–80).
Ide was a parish in the hundred of Exminster in the diocese of Exeter. Haydon’s grandfather, the Rev. B. Cobley, had been Curate of Shillingford and Rector of Dodbrooke.
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