2721. EBB to Margaret Fuller
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 15, 28–29.
Florence.
March 3– 1848.
Dear Miss Fuller,
Let me say so—as not only by means of “common friends,” as you express it, but by directer knowledge & obligation, I seem to be allowed to stand a little nearer to you than a mere stranger might. That we missed the meeting in London, which Mr Mathews [1] & your own gracious inclination planned for me, and afterwards in Pisa, Florence, & Rome, (though altogether it looks like a combination disjunctive; of the stars—an anti-league in the thickest of them!) does not leave me without hope of seeing you one day, when the cards shall have been well shuffled & the chances changed. My husband .. who feels with me of course, when I talk of this hope .. my husband & I are great wanderers & planners & dreamers, .. Bohemians in the spirit; and if one of us was always ready in the body, to act out the fancies of both of us, we should be as probably in Rome as in Florence, by the beginning of next week. It was a disappointment to us on many accounts to be kept in Tuscany throughout the winter: and now we cannot tell or see what our plans may end in, and with how long a tether we may have liberty to go in the green field. For, after all, where, in Italy, can anybody be discontented? it’s “green field” everywhere, I think.
It is now a few days since I received your note & with it the card of your friend the Marchesa Visconti. My husband returned our card of course; and, of course also, we shall be happy to receive a visitor whom you speak of in such words, if it should appear in the least worth her while to expend courtesies on so bare a pauper in the power of repaying them, as myself– Just now, notwithstanding my recovered health & strength, I can neither walk much nor go in a carriage, and I am afraid of the will’s seeming in fault, when indeed it is not to blame:—I should be foolish, therefore, to attempt to make or accept a new acquaintance, without an explanation of the sort. Our friend Mr Hillard, who was so kind to us, & is so agreeable to everybody, will tell you what a secluded life we live here; I keeping to the sofa, & my husband keeping by me.
We unite in this cordial feeling towards you, which leaves me
very sincerely yours
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
I have surely to thank you, too, for a work .. full of excellent thought & noble sentiment, .. which reached me through the author of Festus, [2] just before my marriage & leaving England.
Publication: Notes and Queries, 24 April 1943, pp. 252–253.
Manuscript: Harvard University.
2. Philip James Bailey had sent EBB a copy of Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), along with a copy of his Festus, in January 1846.
___________________
