2698. EBB to Fanny Dowglass
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 14, 295–296.
Palazzo Guidi.
Monday. Sept. 6– [1847] [1]
Now I dare say I shall make you smile a little, dearest friend, by this note & question to come .. but the truth is that we two have laughed in the agony of our doubtfulness about the lady, [2] whom, you intimate, we should recognize at first glance as “sister” & intimate, & whom with open eyes & utter consternation we cant either of us remember ever to have …!! She writes so kindly to us that we would fain know what ought to be known at any rate. Oh, will you have the very great goodness to tell me what I ought to know? I seem to have heard the name. Has she written something, & what? Do tell me & let me breathe. Robert does not doubt (observe) that he has had the honour of an introduction to her .. only introductions pass so in London society, .. one mask follows another in such a slippery fashion, .. that with the best of memories & intentions it is impossible, I suppose, to keep one’s recollections in order. He has seen a good deal of the world, .. always hating it, as he says, & yearning for the “garden of cucumbers” [3] to which he has come now .. though the best & brightest minds in England, which help to constitute London Literary society, are the flower of the world, perhaps, after all. Miss Boyle kindly wrote to invite us to Lorenzo’s villa. I do not go out much just now, & have not been in the carriage since our return from Vallombrosa, on account of certain precautions which may or may not be wise ones; meaning to keep quiet until the time for the great journey comes on the twentieth. But, I shall write & tell her that we shall be happy to receive her here whenever she may think it worth while to bestow on us a few moments of a visit to Florence– Meanwhile, it would be pleasant to know how wide one should open one’s arms for a first embrace–We stand confounded, at this writing, in a “grand peutêtre”– [4]
So you will let me hear again, dear dear friend, .. so I am to have a real letter from you presently! Glad I am of the prospect & the promise. Yet I wish that you had mentioned in the last little sheet, how you were, & if you had triumphed over the nettle-rash– Mind you speak of yourself when you write next. What delightful coolness & freshness! what rains, as if the Heavens were coming down in all their Grace!– I have walked up & down in the balcony & enjoyed .. enjoyed so much!– Thank God sometimes for your friend!– The people here are in great triumph & joy in the grant of the civic guard; and the Te Deum in the Duomo, which Robert went to hear yesterday, was a fine thing, he said– Nothing, however, disappoints me more than the poetical effect (if I may use the expression) than the impressiveness of the R Catholic ceremonies– There seems a want of reality & earnestness—there is something little & mesquin .. where I expected to be shaken & prostrated, I sit calmly & coldly still. We agree sometimes that there is more poetry in the best sense, in the poorest wildest methodist congregation, where the people lift up with their hearts the rugged rhymes of the old psalm, than in what we see & hear in Italy. But God looks through tinsel as through rags—the One finds the Unity where we count the divisions, we with our bisecting eyes!
I am writing hastily or could say so much more– Love your ever affectionate Ba–
Direct Poste Restante—it is safer.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Huntington Library.
1. Year determined from EBB’s reference to the recent return from Vallombrosa.
2. Mary Louisa Boyle (1810–90) youngest of five children of Courtenay Boyle (1770–1844) and Carolina Amelia (née Poyntz, 1773–1851). Mary’s sister Carolina Boyle (1803–83) was, for many years, Maid of Honour to Queen Adelaide, and her uncle was Edmund (1767–1856), 8th Earl of Cork. Mary Boyle wrote The Forester (1839) and The Bridal of Melcha (1844). Shortly after arriving in Florence in the summer of 1847, she, her mother, and her brother Charles John (1806–85) took up residence in the Medici Villa Careggi, which was owned by Henry Edward Fox, 4th Baron Holland (1802–59), who had been appointed envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to the court of Tuscany in 1839. See Mary Boyle: Her Book, edited by Sir Courtenay Boyle (1901), p. 201.
3. Isaiah 1:8.
4. “Great perhaps.” Cf. “Je m’en vais chercher un grand peut-être,” “I go to seek a great perhaps.” (Attributed to Rabelais on his death-bed.)
___________________
