2753. EBB to John Blackwood
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 15, 163–164.
Florence.
Dec 1. [1848] [1]
Dear Sir [2]
I received, through Mr Kenyon, the proof, the remittance, & your courteous explanation of the delay, for all which I desire to thank you & wish I had thanked you sooner– You must try to forgive me especially for having kept the proof so much too long indeed, but knowing by the date that the press did not ‘stand’, I felt the less remorse in the procrastination.
I have given my utmost attention to the proof now returned, and am not without hope that you will admit the general sense to be clearer than when it left your hands, both from such alterations of the text as I found to be possible, & from certain corrections of the press-errors into which my bad manuscript led your good printers. You will perceive among other faults of this kind, the omission of two whole lines in the poem, the tendency of which obviously is to make the whole nonsense. Your suggestion about the footnotes I have attended to; and I leave it to you to omit any one of these, should any strike you on consideration, to be redundant.
Having said this, it remains to me to say another thing. I wish you to consider yourself at the fullest liberty to follow your own preferences on the subject of using this ‘Meditation’ at last, or not using it. Because both you & I have taken trouble about the proof, there is not, therefore, the slightest reason to carry the business farther, .. and I should be concerned on every account that you gave place in your magazine to a long poem of mine, while you doubted its acceptibility to your readers. I leave the question wholly to you, & desire you to feel assured that its decision either way will not embarrass or annoy me. In the case of your rejecting the poem, I will ask you to return the proof to Miss Browning, New Cross Hatcham, near London. In the event of your accepting it, I venture to suggest that as editor of the magazine you should precede it by one word of explanation as to the fact of the poem having been in your hands since last spring. It was written in the preceding winter—and circumstances are now so different & the re-action against pope-worship is so rampant, I do consider that I have some slight claim, both as ‘vatis’ [3] & a common-sense observer, to your testimony to my dates. “In the name of the prophet … Dates!” [4]
In reference to the ‘Prometheus’, if it should still appear to you desirable that I should see a proof, & if you will have one printed on thin paper & forwarded to Miss Browning, she will send it on to me here & I promise to return it in the briefest time possible. This, like the rest, at your own pleasure.
Thanking you again for the courtesy you have shown me,
I remain, dear Sir,
sincerely yours
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
When I glance over my letter, it strikes me that you may impute to indifference to the appearance of the ‘Meditation’ in your magazine, the words I have written simply through an anxiety not to tax your goodnature with it too much. For the rest, of course I should be glad to see the poem appear in the way I preferred for it from the first, though other ways were open to me—of course I should be glad!
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: National Library of Scotland.
1. Year provided by EBB’s references to “A Meditation in Tuscany,” the publication of which she discusses in earlier letters.
2. John Blackwood (1818–79), sixth surviving son of the founder William Blackwood, assumed the editorship of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1845 and held the post until his death in 1879.
3. “Poet,” “prophet,” or “seer.”
4. Cf. James and Horatio Smith, Rejected Addresses (1812), “No. 10. Johnson’s Ghost.”
___________________
