1686. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 9, 98–99.
[London]
Wednesday. [Postmark: 14 August 1844]
My dearest Mr Boyd,
I must thank you for the great, great pleasure with which I have this moment read your note—the more welcome, as (without hypocrisy!) I had worked myself up into a nervous apprehension, from your former one, that I should seem so “rudis atque incomposita” [1] to you, in consequence of certain licences, as to end by being intolerable. I know what an ear you have!—and how you can hear the dust on the wheel as it goes on! Well—I wrote to you yesterday, to beg you to be patient & considerate.
But you are always given to surprise me with abundant kindness,—with supererogatory kindness. I believe in that, certainly.
I am very, very glad that you think me stronger & more perspicuous. For the perspicuity, I have struggled hard.
And I am very grateful to you for drinking my health—it is doing me only too much honour! & in such wine!—and from your high classical lips,—and from Miss Heard’s high heroic lips, .. and from Miss Kate Heard’s right roseate ones!!! I thank you all,—wishing, for my own part, to be worthier.
But how can it be, that Miss Heard has not her copy? [2] and you wd have mentioned it, I think, if she had received it. It was sent to her on monday, together with the vial.
Your affectionate & grateful
Elibet.
Address: H S Boyd Esqr / 24 (a) Grove End Road / St John’s Wood.
Publication: EBB-HSB, p, 262.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. “Lack of form and structure” (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, IX, 4, 17).
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