Correspondence

1547.  EBB to Richard Hengist Horne

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 8, 227.

[London]

Friday Morng [23 February 1844] [1]

Will this do for Mr Heraud?

 

“Thy heart-gates, mighty, open either way,—

Come they to feast, or go they forth to pray.”

“Man in the Republic”

by Cornelius Mathews [2]

or

 

“Oh you who sentried stand upon the temple-wall

Holy, & nearer to the glory’s golden fall,—

Moonlike possess & shed at large its rays–

The wide world knitting in a web of light,

Whose every thread the gladdening truth makes bright;

Peace, love, & universal brotherhood,

Goodwill to man, & faith in God the good.” [3]

or else

 

<“>Yet quiring God’s behest with truth & power,—

Pitch your blest speech, or high or low,

That angels may its language, own & know,

Through the round Heaven to which it rises,

And ever on the earth may fall with glad surprises

The spring-sweet music of a sudden shower,” [4]

All of these mottos are taken from Mr Mathews’s “Man in the Republic”—& I think, if you could make up your mind to any one of them, you wd give pleasure in a kindness– What do you think?

Ever yours

EBB.

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.

1. Dated by the previous letter, in which EBB promised to write again the same day, if successful in thinking of a motto for Heraud.

2. “The Poet,” lines 49–50. Horne did not use these as a motto, but did include them in the text of the chapter on Taylor and the author of Festus (II, 297).

3. “The Preacher,” lines 16–22. Horne drew a vertical line through the first three lines of this quotation, and used them for Mrs. Shelley (II, 224).

4. “The Preacher,” lines 59–64. Horne did not use these.

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