1545. EBB to Richard Hengist Horne
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 8, 224–225.
[London]
[?22] [February 1844] [1]
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“She was fair
Enough; and wanted not the setting off
Of such a black.”
B and Fletcher. [2]
I recommend, in preference, the following—either both of them––or the last of them.
“A Vision, like incarnate April, warning
With smiles and tears, Frost the anatomy
Into his summer grave.”
Shelley [3]
“You might hear, by the heaving of her breast,
That the coming and going of the wind
Brought pleasure there, & left passion behind.”
Shelley. [4]
The last is the most characteristic, I fancy; but both the last are appropriate—are they not?
For Mrs Shelley–
With motion like the spirit of that wind
Whose soft step deepens slumber, her light feet
Past thro’ the peopled haunts of human kind,
Scattering sweet visions from her presence
sweet.
Shelley’s Witch of Atlas [5]
or
“The deep recesses of her odorous dwelling
Were stored with magic treasures—sounds of air,
Which had the power all spirits of compelling,
Folded in cells of chrystal silence there;
Such as we hear in youth——”
Shelley’s Witch of Atlas. [6]
For the imaginative tale-writers in general,
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Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Date based on the previous letter, in which EBB tells Horne that she “will write again by the eight o’clock post (tonight),” and which she ended with a motto for Mrs. Shelley.
2. The Coronation, act IV, sc. 3. This play was licensed as a production of James Shirley, but, inexplicably, the first published version (1640) credited John Fletcher with authorship, even though he died ten years before the play was performed. Although Shirley confirmed his authorship by including this title in a list of his works in 1652, several editions of the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher included it.
3. Epipsychidion (1821), lines 121–123.
4. “The Sensitive Plant” (Prometheus Unbound, 1820), lines 136–138.
5. “The Witch of Atlas” (Posthumous Poems, 1824), LX, 1–4.
6. Op. cit., XIV, 1–5. Horne did not make use of any of these suggestions.
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