2549. EBB to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 13, 275–276.
[London]
Friday. [Postmark: 21 August 1846]
Dearest this is to be a brief letter, though my heart shall find room in whatever goes to you. Yesterday cost us nothing—no observation was made: we were in all security notwithstanding the forbodings on either side. May they find such an end in circumstances of still more consequence. Dearest, your flowers are beautiful beyond their beauty of yesterday which I praised—they think themselves still in the garden,—we have done them no sort of wrong. What a luring thought you leave with me in the flowers! How I look at them as a sign of you, left behind—your footstep in the ground! It has been so from the beginning– And yet sometimes you try to prove that you are not always good—you!–
If you are not good, it is because you are best– I will admit so much–
Oh, to look back! It is so wonderful to me to look back on my life & my old philosophy of life, made of the necessities of sorrow & the resolution to attain to something better than a perpetual moaning & complaint,—to that state of neutralized emotion to which I did attain—that serenity which meant the failure of hope! Can I look back to such things, & not thank you next to God? For you, who had the power, to stoop to having the will,—is it not worthy of thanks? So I thank you & love you & shall always, however it may be hereafter– I could not feel otherwise to you, I think, than by my feeling at this moment–
How Papa has startled me– He came in while I was writing .. (I shut the writing case as he walked over the floor—) & then, after the usual talk of the weather, & how the nights “were growing cold”, … he said suddenly .. looking to the table––“What a beautiful colour those little blue flowers have—” Calling them just so, .. “little blue flowers”. I could scarcely answer I was so frightened—but he observed nothing & turned & left the room with his favorite enquiry “pour rire,” [1] as to whether he “could do anything for me in the city”–
Do anything for me in the city!!– Well—do you do something for me, by thinking of me & loving me, Robert– Dear you are, never to be tired of me, with so much reason for it as I know. May God bless you, very dear!—& ever dearest! I am your own too entirely to need
to say so.
Ba–
Address: Robert Browning Esqre / New Cross / Hatcham / Surrey.
Postmark: 4Eg4 AU21 1846 A.
Docket, in RB’s hand: 251.
Publication: RB-EBB, pp. 980–981.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. “In jest.”
___________________
