2674. EBB to Sarianna Browning
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 14, 196–197.
[Florence]
[7 May 1847] [1]
How am I to thank you, dearest Sarianna, for all your goodness & kindness to me, & your dear mother’s which touches me so deeply? Believe of me that your affection is precious, & that every sign of it has a price to me beyond itself– And these signs .. these gifts .. make me ashamed. I scarcely know how to thank you both, for what seems to me too much & too pretty in this prettiest of possible cardcases & pencilcases. Will you thank for me your dear mother? And you, who send me back my lost goods transfigured into something ten times prettier than what I lost, will you let me thank yourself, dear Sarianna? And for having spent time on me in worsted work boots, & cap & muffetees, (are they not called muffetees?) which Robert & I turn round & round in wonder & admiration as some new miracle of San Ranieri’s ..!—thank you, thank you– I like to remember gratefully that while these miraculous stitches were being taken one after another, you had kind thoughts in your head which were of still more price to me than the work of your fingers!– Then your father’s sketches which we spent half an evening in admiring .. (what expression & character they have!) .. here are true thanks for them too. I may well be out of breath with thanking you all—you are good, kind, & dear to me. Have I not a note of yours, or two notes, full of your own & your dear mother’s goodness to me? It is well that it is so much easier to be grateful than deserving, and it is happy when one feels satisfied with that knowledge, as I do every day. My strength is very much recovered since we arrived in Florence, having determined to atone for a most exceptional course of stupidity & wilfulness, by the utmost prudence & submission in the way of lying flat on the sofa instead of doing after the devices of my own heart. Really I eat & sleep, & look scandalously well, considering that I have’nt seen the Raffaeles & Michael Angelos yet & have been a fortnight within half a mile of them. I should despise myself if it were not for the glory of the selfdenial, which always makes people proud, you know, in this virtuous world of ours. ‘En revanche’ [2] I was humbled enough in Pisa .. so much, that I wont talk of it any more. Only I should not certainly have imagined it possible for me to be so stupid. I did everything wrong, tell your dear mother, except “walking up stairs” .. we had no stairs to walk up unless in entering from the street; & as Robert has always maintained since our marriage that he married me principally in order to carry me up stairs, I never was allowed to set foot upon stair from the beginning to the end:—it’s the only kind of tyranny he ever has used against me. Yesterday for the first time we went out in the carriage & drove through Florence—it was like a vision—& the air & the light of it like paradise itself. The hills round the city are so wonderfully beautiful, through the variety of form & the number & the colour– Such clustering hills, doubling every light with a shadow! I wish you were here, to walk with Robert. May God bless you my dearest Sarianna! Give my grateful love to your mother & father– She is better still, I do hope. Think of me always as
Your affectionate sister
Ba
May 8–
Your picture, Robert came suddenly & made me break off my note without speaking of. And yet how eagerly I looked for it & at it, in the hope of knowing you ‘face to face’ after some imperfect fashion at least. After all he wont let me flatter myself .. he declares that it is’nt in the least like you .. except the hair. A very pretty sketch, in any case, & it is something to be able to call it by your name.
Address, on integral page: Miss Browning.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Lilly Library.
1. Probable date suggested by the postscript “May 8,” which suggests that the letter was written the previous day; year determined by EBB’s references to the move from Pisa to Florence.
2. “In return.”
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