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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