1563. EBB to Richard Hengist Horne
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 8, 246–247.
[London]
Wednesday. [6 March 1844] [1]
Thank you my dear Mr Horne—you are kinder than kind. I am delighted with the engravings, & shall have the poets at least, framed & hung up in this room– I only wish the editor had been one of them. [2]
No more superfluous words to trouble you withal.
Only thank you, & thank you again.
EBB.
By the way, or rather out of the way, I hope I did not seem to infer any disrespect to Sara Coleridge in a general remark made in my letter yesterday. [3] I forgot her while I wrote it. She is not a poet—she does not pretend to the faculty—but she has a lively fancy, as she has expressed it in her prose fairy tale,—& possesses perhaps more learning, in the strict sense, than any female writer of the day. A theological essay, in appendix to the late edition of her father’s philosophical works, is remarkable for its erudition, & its calm & candid ratiocination. [4] A little wire-drawn, [5] but of sturdy metal. I have a high respect for Mrs Coleridge.
And you will please to recollect, Mr Horne, that when I talk of women, I do not speak of them, (as many men do, & as perhaps you yourself are somewhat inclined to do) according to a separate, peculiar, & womanly standard, but according to the common standard of human nature.
There is a post[s]cript scarcely proportionate to the antescript!——
Address: R H Horne Esqr / 5. Fortess Terrace / Kentish Town.
Publication: EBB-RHH, II, 161–164.
Manuscript: Pierpont Morgan Library.
1. Month and year provided by the postmark; the day based on the topic of women writers “in my letter yesterday.”
2. i.e., copies of the engravings included in A New Spirit; Horne’s own portrait was not among them.
4. Her essay “On Rationalism” was included in the 5th edition (1843) of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (pp. 335–556).
5. Cf. Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (1623), act I, sc. 1.
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