1598. EBB to Thomas Westwood
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 8, 300–301.
[London]
Monday. April 16 [sic, for 15] 1844.
My dear Mr Westwood,
I could not write on saturday, & cannot very well today .. & yet I must try to prevent your getting as far wrong in conjecture & inference, as you seem to be doing. I do not “know” Mr Horne in the usual sense of the word .. I never saw him face to face in my life .. & I have no further intercourse with him, than by such correspondence as I have with yourself. Whether this fact renders either probable or possible the sort of alliance you predicate concerning, .. I might safely leave to your logic to determine—but I am afraid of your imagination intervening, .. the audible “mewing” in question proving the latter faculty on your part, whatever else it may not prove on mine. Therefore I proceed to assure you … that I neither claim nor have a right to claim any single article, nor any single portion of any article in the New Spirit of the Age. [1] Whatever the coincidences may be, I cannot help thinking that if I had the book within reach (which I have not .. for I borrowed it to read,—) I might point out to you such serious & obvious clashings with my individuality, as to break your bubble to your own perception. As it is, however, I can only make the general statement. Surely surely, it was not likely that I shd lean to utilitarianism .. in the notice on Carlyle .. as I remember the writer of that article leans somewhere! I who am reproached with trans-trans-transcendentalisms! & not without reason—or with insufficient reason!–
Oh—and I shd say also, that Mr Horne in his kindness, has enlarged considerably,—in his annotations & reflections on me personally. My being in correspondence with all the kings of the earth, for instance, is an exaggeration—although literary-work in one way, will bring with it happily, literary association in others,—& the kindness for which I am grateful to yourself, dear Mr Westwood, has not come to me alone from you. Still, I am not a great letter-writer——and I dont write “elegant Latin verses”, as all the gods of Rome know—and I have not been shut up in the dark for seven years, by any manner of means. [2] By the way, a barrister said to my barrister-brother the other day—“I suppose your sister is dead.” “Dead,” said he—a little struck “—dead”!! “Why yes!– After Mr Horne’s account of her being sealed up hermetically in the dark for so many years,—one can only calculate upon her being dead by this time.”!—
In great haste believe me
Ever very truly yours
Elizabeth B Barrett.
Publication: LEBB, I, 174 (in part, as 16 April 1844).
Manuscript: British Library.
1. EBB’s denial is, of course, untrue; see, for example, her particular contributions to the Tennyson and Carlyle papers (pp. 353–367).
2. EBB quotes Horne’s comments about her in A New Spirit (II, 132–134 and our Appendix IV, p. 342).
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