1986. EBB to Julia Martin
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 11, 6–8.
[London]
Monday. [Postmark: 28 July 1845]
My dearest Mrs Martin,
I am ashamed not to have written before, & yet have courage enough to ask you to write to me as soon as you can. Day by day I have had good intentions enough (the fact is) about writing, to seem to deserve some good deeds from you—which is contrary to all wisdom & reason I know, but is rather natural after all. What my deeds have been, you will be apt to ask? Why all manner of idleness, which is the most interrupting you know, of all things. The Hedleys have been flitting backwards & forwards .. staying, some of them, for a month at a time in London, & then going, & then coming again—& I have had other visitors .. few but engrossing “after their kind.” [1] And I have been ‘getting well’ .. which is a process—going out into the carriage two or three times a week, abdicating my sofa for my armchair .. moving from one room to another now & then, .. & walking about mine quite as well as, & with considerably more complacency than a child of two years old. Altogether I do think that if you were kind enough to be glad to see me looking better when you were in London, you wd be kind enough to be still gladder if you saw me now. Everybody praises me, & I look in the looking-glass with a better conscience. Also it is an improving improvement—& will be, until, you know, the last hem of the garment of summer is lost sight of—& then, & then, I must either follow to another climate .. or be ill again .. that I know, & am prepared for. It is but dreary work, this undoing of my Penelope web in the winter, [2] after the doing of it through the summer—& the more progress one makes in one’s web, the more dreary the prospect of the undoing of all these fine silken stitches– But we shall see. Where do you go this winter? Do you think of Seville? or will you be constant to Pau? And in the meantime .. during this same summer, .. how is dear Mr Martin? I trust that what my darling little Ibbit Hedley (who was born at Florence) calls pathetically her ‘native land,’ may not have thrown him back to any degree worth lamenting, with the dampnesses & hay-anxieties of Herefordshire—& what a child that is .. that Ibbit! She seems to me to be inspired with the very genius of childhood,—so full of fancy & hope she is, & so alive down to the very [‘]bouts rimés’ [3] of her golden hair! And if I speak partially, there is no wonder in it—for she has been staying in the house with us, & has taken a passionate affection for Flush & me .. (you see how modestly & prudently in fact, I grant Flush the precedence,—) & given such signs of a resolute inclination to live altogether in this room with me, that I had to keep a garisson [sic] at the door to save my life a little.
Oh, ungrateful scribe that I am, not to have thanked you before the end of this page, for being godmother to the Ledbury flowers & promising & vowing them to me! They are beautiful—& you, kind, as ever! Write to me,—will you? I am going out now .. (tell Mr Martin to canonize my virtue for it) .. & I bear it better, but do not pretend to enjoy it particularly.
Ever your affectionate
Ba.
Dearest Mrs Martin, how cd you think that I shd not fully appreciate your goodness in coming to us for that moment as you passed through London? I fully understood & thanked you for it!– Have you comfort from Australia?
Address: Mrs Martin / Colwall / Malvern.
Publication: LEBB, I, 266–267 (in part, as 29 July 1845).
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Cf. Genesis 1:11.
2. EBB refers to Penelope weaving a shroud during the day and unravelling it at night in order to stall her suitors until Odysseus returned.
3. “Rhymed ends.”
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