2367. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 12, 336–337.
[London]
[mid-May 1846] [1]
I thank you, dearest Mr Boyd, for the coffee, & would have written immediately to thank you, but I thought I ought to appreciate it properly before I began to thank you for giving me the opportunity. It is very good, I think, but inferior to my recollection of what I used to find at your house. Perhaps it would seem better, if you were sitting by: and, to try the experiment, I am thinking, musing, dreaming, of going to see you some day. Oh—it is not a joke, indeed! I am coming,—& am not so far off as the end of the world, however you may consider of it. In the meantime, while I take your coffee apart from you, I thank you, & am quite aware of its being better than most sublunary coffee besides.
Dearest Mr Boyd, when I go to see you, I will not ask you to meet me on the stairs or in the drawing room– I would not run the risk of doing you any harm: but I will ask you, on the other hand, to let it all pass quietly, & with as little retrospection as may be– I shall feel a good deal in seeing you, & being weak still in soul & body, would try to keep as calm as possible. Believe that I have the truest affection for you, & that if sorrow has not changed me in this respect, still less can any manner of joy.
As to Ossian, I have endeavoured vainly to procure the book you spoke of by purchase; but as soon as Mr Kenyon returns, I will teaze him into teazing his friends until we get it somehow. My infinite generosity, or else desperate despondency, in so loading the pistols which are to shoot my head off, is therefore most “aspectable” … to use an old favorite word of yours–
May God bless you, dearest Mr Boyd–
I am ever your affectionate
& grateful
Elibet.
Publication: EBB-HSB, pp. 264–265 (as [25 September 1844]).
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Conjectural dating based on EBB’s reference to a forthcoming visit to Boyd, which took place on 30 June; and her reference to Kenyon’s being away, presumably at Portsmouth with his ailing friend, Captain Jones, who died on 24 May (see letter 2353, note 3).
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