1639. Richard Hengist Horne to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 31–32.
[London]
Thursday [Postmark: 27 June 1844]
But you are not making yourself ill, more, with all this labour of revision? I hope my dear Miss Barrett, you are not. Recollect that a few days are not so important—and a few days now, may cost you weeks. Looking over some poems the other day, with a notion of changing some mottoes, I found the stanza on the other side, which I transcribe to do you good amidst your hard mechanical as well as soul’s labour. I wish I could find a good one for Dickens and Browning[,] not being satisfied with what is.
Yours
H.
“E’en as God erst, if his Almighty will,
Breathed through his prophets the poetic fire,
So be the hand-maid of religion still,
And flash a holy lightning from thy lyre:
So thy high destinies thou shalt fulfil—
For therefore with this love doth God inspire
Each state of man, savage and skill’d, that so
Uprising with thy wings, to greatness he may grow.”
Ernest. [1]
From the suppressed Poems of “Ernest.” In the Introduction where he speaks of Poetry.
Address: Miss E. B. Barrett / 50 Wimpole St / Cavendish Sqre.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Pierpont Morgan Library.
1. Ernest, or “Political Regeneration” [A poem by C. Lofft the younger] (1839). Horne did not use these lines as a motto in the second edition of A New Spirit.
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