1977. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 10, 313–314.
[London]
Saturday. [19 July 1845] [1]
My very dear friend you are kind to exceeding kindness,—and I am as grateful as any of your long-ago kind invitations ever found me. It is something pleasant indeed & like a return to life, to be asked by you to spend two or three days in your house—& I thank you for this pleasantness, & for the goodness, on your own part, which induced it. You may be perfectly sure that no Claypon, though he should live in Arcadia, [2] would be preferred by me to you as a host—& I wonder how you could entertain the imagination of such a thing. Mr Kenyon indeed has asked me repeatedly to spend a few hours on a sofa in his house—and the Regent’s Park being so much nearer than you are, I had promised to think of it—: but I have not yet found it possible to accomplish even that quarter of a mile’s preferment; & my ambition is forced to be patient when I begin to think of St John’s Wood. I am considerably stronger & increasing in strength—and in time & with a further advance of the summer, I may do “such things .. what they are yet, I know not.” [3] Yes—I know that they relate to you—& that I have a hope, as well as an earnest & affectionate desire, to sit face to face with you once more before this summer closes. Do, in the meantime, believe, that I am very grateful to you for your kind, considerate proposal, & that it is not made in vain for my wishes, … & that I am not likely willingly “to spend two or three days” with anybody in the world, before I do so with yourself.
Mr Hunter has not paid us his usual saturday’s visit, & therefore I have no means of answering the questions you put in relation to him. We will ask him about ‘times & seasons’ [4] when next we see him—& you shall hear.
Did you ever hear much of Robert Montgomery [5] .. commonly called Satan Montgomery .. because the author of ‘Satan,’ of the ‘Omnipresence of the Deity,’ & of various poems which pass through edition after edition, nobody knows how .... or why? I understand that his pew (he is a clergyman) is sown over with red rosebuds from ladies of the congregation—& that the same fair hands have made & presented to him, in the course of a single season, one hundred pair of slippers. Whereupon somebody said to this Reverend Satan, “I never knew before, Mr Montgomery, that you were a centipede.”
Dearest Mr Boyd’s
affectionate & grateful
Elibet.
Address: H S Boyd Esqre / 24 (a) Grove End Road / St John’s Wood.
Publication: LEBB, I, 264–266 (as 21 July 1845).
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. This letter is postmarked 21 July 1845, a Monday.
2. We have been unable to explain this allusion.
3. Cf. II Esdras 4:46.
4. Daniel 2:21.
5. For EBB’s previous comments about Montgomery, see letters 1058, 1468, and 1622.
___________________
