1972. EBB to Mary Russell Mitford
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 301–304.
[London]
Friday. [11 July 1845] [1]
I send you the order at last ever dearest Miss Mitford, & my parcel must be for another day. Your letter was three times welcome & four times kind—& it is delightful to me to know that your indulgence is so great towards me & mine as to allow you to forgive the character of an escapade which with your true & just notions of the filial tie & its duties, must have struck you (if only your instincts worked) as something so blameable & wrong altogether. I told them all what you were likely to think of them!——but you are better than my traditions of you, were!—& really, I, for one, feel just as grateful as if I belonged to the criminal body belonging to me. Yes—there is an excess of strictness. Too much is found objectionable. And the result is that everything that can be done in an aside, is done, without too much consideration perhaps of the right & the wrong. Not that there is the least inclination to an over-wildness—I see nothing of such a thing—nothing! But dear Papa’s wishes wd be consulted more tenderly, if his commands were less straight & absolute. We are all dealt with alike, you know—& I do not pretend to more virtue than my peers. Nevertheless I could not, I think, have let that pleasure pay for the pain .. the anxiety & fear .. of the day at Whiteknights,.. as they did:—and as it was, I was in a complete terror the whole hours of their absence, I do admit to you,.. & in an agony, when our grand Signor’s step sounded on the stair just ten minutes before Arabel appeared in my room. It did however all pass off serenely here—and nobody seems to suffer much from remorse in consequence of these mysterious pleasures by the side of the Loddon. “The lady in the pink bonnet,” I understand to be Mrs Roberts [2] .. who was the wife—the widow .. of Papa’s brother—& who re-married some four or five years ago, after a two years’ wearing of weeds. She is no great favorite of mine—though I understand that it is ungrateful of me to say so—& in fact, she has certainly taken one or two unmistakeable steps towards a sentimental friendship with me, for which in her relation, I feel myself perfectly unfitted. I love my uncle’s memory too dearly & tenderly for it—& then she has pretensions, which are not quite claims, to poetry & German philosophy, & talks of the union of souls as she ties her ribbands. Ah—I know what you may be smiling at!– I am not, I know, .. myself .. quite sans reproche, [3] or at all, in matters of this class—but then, there is a difference, even in the holding of fantasies & sentiments, between earnestness & pretension—& it is the pretension, the want of reality, which displeases me in the pink bonnet. Mr Roberts I do not know personally—but he is said to be scientific, & unrefined, as those scientific men are apt to be—only very much in love still, & fond of his wife & her baby. Mrs Hedley<,> the Mrs Hedley, who was at your strawberry festival, is a Mrs George Hedley, the wife of the brother of my uncle Hedley—& she is pretty, I think, & generally considered so. All your guests came away adoring you—& I hear that Mrs Roberts thought seriously of living in your cottage either with you or instead of you all the days of her life [4] —which was something of a supererogatory compliment.
Mr Horne is with you now, I take for granted? If so, give him my regards. And in a lower voice .. quite low .. between you & me .. I breathe my orisons for his full success in the Hayward quarry, while he does his falconry in your neighbourhood. [5]
Just at present my aunt Mrs Hedley is staying in the house with us, & between my two little cousins Ibbit & Lizzie [6] I am living as among guardian angels. They both of them choose to love me with a passion—& I tell them that they will end by making me the vainest person in Christendom. Such pretty little girls, both of them—& Ibbit, who is only ten years old, the most enchanting, carressing little creature under the sun—full of fancy & joy,—& with an overflow of life which really seems to flow in an electric current down to the very shining ends of her long golden ringlets. Lizzie you know, is quietness itself—serene & meek—with a still deep passive sensibility which rather absorbs than expresses. Ibbit on the contrary, cant be still a moment, any more than she can move without grace—her very hair all alive, as I said, .. & the sense of life kindling & breathing from her eyes & lips—& the sense of life the same thing with the sense of love,—so passionate she is! It is a picture to see those children together—& they have nearly kissed my cheeks & fingers away this morning, dear things!—with their ‘dearest Bas’ said one against another. On saturday Ibbit goes to Brighton with her mother—for a time at least.
I continue to gain strength very much, & surprise people who see me only at intervals—& if no winter were coming I shd half begin to take courage again. I was in the carriage the other day & got as far into Regent’s Park as the bridge, without fainting absolutely—& I can walk about as well as a child of two years old—that is, .. without faltering & tottering too much. Asses milk has done some of the good, & the sun the rest & most of it—& your goodness & affectionateness make me talk of myself in this shameful way! for I assure you I never do it to people in general.
Have you seen the “Compagnon du tour de France” by George Sand? [7] I sent for it, with a fancy that it might be a traveller’s book .. just that—& it is one of her best romances, & full of curious interest of different kinds. Do send for it,—yes—& tell me your mind!–
Ever dearest Miss Mitford’s attached
EBB.
Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 128–131.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Dated by reference to the recent picnic at Three Mile Cross.
2. Anne Elizabeth Moulton-Barrett (née Gordon), daughter of William Gordon, was the second wife of EBB’s uncle Sam who died in 1837. She had remarried Martyn John Roberts on 25 September 1840.
3. “Blameless.”
4. Cf. Psalm 23:6.
6. As previously identified (letter 1935, note 14), “Lizzie” was the daughter of EBB’s cousin George Goodin Barrett; “Ibbit” was Elizabeth Jane Hedley (b. 1834), to whom EBB had addressed “A Song Against Singing” to “My Dear Little Cousin Elizabeth Jane H______” in The Seraphim, pp. 318–320.
7. Le Compagnon du Tour de France appeared in 1841.
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