1866. Mary Russell Mitford to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 128.
Three Mile Cross,
March 18, 1845.
Oh! my very dear love, I grieve that, as I had feared, you are suffering from this weather. It cannot last long, indeed I think that it is breaking already. I have had a present of some roses blown in a hothouse—cut flowers. Yesterday morning they were found on the drawing-room table, with their stalks in ice, instead of water. All the contents of the vase was frozen into a solid mass; and that, in a room with a fire every day, on the 17th of March! [1] Poor pretty roses! They did not mind it at all, and looked just as fresh and smelt as sweet as in their native conservatory. It was a strange contrast, to look at the green stalks crowned with such splendid blossoms and fixed into a mass of solid ice—summer and winter in one’s hand at once. But the ice melted and the roses remained; and that is an emblem of what we may hope for now. There is comfort in that thought. My poor Flush suffers much from the weather. He has had a bad cough; and now that that is gone he has had a frightful attack of cramp from the cold. I was obliged to get him carried to Mrs. Amott’s, for he could not walk; and, in her warm room, in about an hour he so far recovered as to walk home. But, poor love, he has been very, very poorly and will hardly get out.
I have the first volume of Victor Hugo’s “Odes et Ballades,” [2] but they are slavishly loyal to those vile old Bourbons. What could he see in them? I suppose I shall like the second volume better.
Heaven bless you, my beloved friend!
Ever your own,
M.R.M.
Text: L’Estrange (2), III, 196.
1. A report in The Athenæum for 29 March 1845 explained that the temperature on the night of 13 March was 13 degrees, the lowest for that time of year in the London area for at least 48 years. See letter 1846, note 4.
2. EBB had recommended Hugo’s works to Miss Mitford in letter 1736.
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