2572. EBB to Mrs. L.A. Holdich
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 13, 321–323.
50 Wimpole Street
September. [1846] [1]
My dear Mrs Holdich [2]
If I have seemed to pause in giving back my gratitude in exchange for your generous sympathy, believe that the silence meant anything rather than an unwillingness to be grateful to you—I thank you much & gladly for all the words you have expended on me. As a poet, (if I dare call myself by such a name) I feel it to be better than the old heroical parsley crowns, [3] to have a blade of grass gathered & given by a stranger’s hand, in token of sympathy– What I have written has been just my heart .. and the written heart, like the heart under the boddice, leaps up at a sympathizing word, a kind word like these of yours! I thank you for all of them from my heart.
To Mr Pitman [4] I will write & offer other thanks, for a too generous reception before the public– Americans have been generally so lenient & cordial to me, that I could take the Roman emperor’s wish & turn it to gentler uses, [5] —I could wish that the American people had only one hand, that I might touch it with a reverent gratitude. But it is wiser, to wish instead that I were worthier of their kindness! It is wisest, & pleasantest, to wish & to hope that I may become so one day–
In the meanwhile it appears to me simply right, to reply to the interest you express in me, by telling you that my health, which, for the last two years has been perceptibly rallying, is now (through the mildness of last winter which saved me from my yearly relapse) quite in a different state—I may call it health now– If I compass my plan of escaping the next winter season in Italy, I am sanguine as to being as well as a woman need be, who has no ambition to leap fences & walk twenty miles a day. We are satisfied, you know, many of us, in being able to sit in the sun & walk leisurely among the rose-trees. That, too, will be enough for me. God has taught me indeed by some hard lessons,—& at last I began to think that it must be necessary for me, in His eyes, to live on continually in sorrow & pain– In sorrow—for the sickness was not alone: the sickness was the least burden. But now, the page seems turned, and the next lesson may be easier—who knows?
You are a woman & have felt for me. So I could not send you a letter back empty of feelings of my own.
May God bless you (where a woman’s best blessings fall!) in those whom you love, & in the thoughts you bestow on them. May you seldom think sadly of them! may they be obviously happy through you! —And if you would still be kind to the writer of these words, .. pray for as much good to fall on her!—
Very faithfully your friend
Elizabeth Barrett Barrett.
Miss Mitford is my very kind & dear friend. She has known me these seven years, & never has been less to me than affectionate. And when I was a child too, I used to walk with her (& you!) at Aberleigh. [6]
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: R.H. Taylor Collection.
1. Year based on handwriting and EBB’s reference to Pitman’s review of A Drama of Exile, which appeared in the Methodist Quarterly Review of January 1846.
2. Lydia Austin Holdich (née Kollock, 1800–79), a writer of children’s stories. Her husband was Rev. Joseph Holdick, Secretary of the American bible Society. She was a member of the New York Ladies’ Home Missionary Society.
3. An allusion to the Greek tradition of placing parsley on tombs because of its long-lasting greenness.
4. R.C. Pitman has been identified as the author of a review of Drama of Exile, which appeared in The Methodist Quarterly Review in January 1846; for the complete text, see vol. 11, pp. 355–360.
5. According to Suetonius, Caligula wished that the Roman people had only a single neck so he could sever it.
6. A “little hamlet” in Miss Mitford’s Our Village.
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