2734. EBB to Sarianna Browning
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 15, 81–83.
[Florence]
[mid-May 1848] [1]
My dearest Sarianna, At last you see I give sign of life– The love, I hope you believed in without sign or symbol—and even for the rest, Robert promised to answer for me like godfather or godmother, & bear the consequence of my sins. In fact, what was I to say if I had written? I hated to keep up a moaning which did no good, & the disquietude of doubtfulness in the first instance seemed still less productive. Meanwhile I have loved you & thanked you all whenever I thought of you, .. & if you could hear how you are talked of day by day & hour by hour, you never could fancy the thoughts long absent & astray.
We are a little uneasy just now as to whether you will be overjoyed or underjoyed by our new scheme of taking an unfurnished apartment. It would spoil all, for instance, if your dear mother seemed disappointed .. vexed .. in the least degree. And I can understand how, to persons at a distance & of course unable to understand the whole circumstances of the case, the fact of an apartment taken & furnished, may seem to involve some dreadful giving up for ever & ever of country & family!– Which would be as dreadful to us as to you! How could we give you up, do you think, when we love you more & more? Oh no. If Robert has succeeded in making clear the subject to you, you will all perceive just as we know, that we have simply thus solved the problem of making our small income carry us to England not only next summer but many a summer after. We should like to give every summer to dear England, & hide away from the cold only when it comes. By our scheme, we shall have saved money even at the end of the present year—while for afterward, here’s a residence, that is, a pied à terre, in Italy, all but free when we wish to use it, & when we care to let it, producing eight or ten pounds a month in help of travelling expenses. It’s the best investment for Mr Moxon’s money, we could have looked the world over for. So the learned tell us—and after all, you know, we only pay in the proportion of your ‘working classes,’ in the Pancras building contrived for them by the philanthropy of your Southwood Smiths. [2] I do wish you could see what rooms we have—what ceilings, what height & breadth, what a double terrace for orange-trees, .. how cool, how likely to be warm, how perfect every way! Robert leaned once to a ground-floor in the Frescobaldi palace, being bewitched by a garden full of camelias, & a little pond of gold & silver fish—but, while he saw the fish, I saw the mosquitos in clouds, .. such an apocolypse [sic] of them as had not yet been visible to me in all Florence, .. and I dread mosquitos more than Austrians, and he in his unspeakable goodness, deferred to my fear in a moment & gave up the camelias without one look behind. A heavy conscience I should have, if it were not that the camelia-garden was certainly less private than our terrace here, where we can have camelias also if we please. How pretty & pleasant your cottage at Windsor must be! We had a long muse over your father’s sketch of it, & set faces at the windows. That the dear invalid is better for the change must have brightened it too to her companions—and the very sound of a ‘forest’ is something peculiarly delightful & untried to me. I know hills well .. and of the sea, too much! but now I want forests; or quite, quite mountains, such as you have not in England.
Robert says that if Blackwood likes to print a poem of mine & send you the proofs, you will be so very good as to like to correct them. [3] To me it seems too much to ask, when you have work for him to do, beside. Will it be too much? or is nothing so, to your kindness? I wd ask my other sisters, who would gladly, dear things, do it for me—but I have misgivings through their being so entirely unaccustomed to occupations of the sort, or any critical reading of poetry of any sort. Robert is quite well & in the best spirits,—& has the headache now only very occasionally. I am as well as he, having quite recovered my strength & power of walking. So we wander to the bridge of Trinità every evening after tea, to see the sunset on the Arno. May God bless you all! Give my true love to your father & mother—& my loving thanks to yourself for that last stitch in the stool!– How good you are, Sarianna, to your ever affectionate sister! Ba.
Always remind your dear mother that we are no more bound here, than when in furnished lodgings!– It is a mere name.
Address, on integral page: Miss Browning.
Publication: LEBB, I, 369–371 (in part, as [about June 1848]).
Manuscript: Lilly Library.
1. The approximate date is suggested by EBB’s references to the Brownings’ return to Casa Guidi, which occurred on 9 May 1848.
3. This is the first of several references to “A Meditation in Tuscany,” which EBB had begun the previous autumn and finished during the winter (see letter 2741). Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine did not publish the poem; it would eventually form the first part of Casa Guidi Windows.
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