2801. EBB to Arabella Moulton-Barrett
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 15, 308–311.
[Bagni di Lucca]
July 4. [1849] [1]
My ever ever dearest Arabel, on this dearest day [2] I write one word to say how I love you, think of you always, long to see you with my soul! May God bless you, & make you & keep you happy. Never will you find any in the world to love you better than I do, more tenderly, more gratefully, my own dear sister. May God bless you. See what a sketch I have made for you to laugh at & catch up some idea of the place we have climbed to. The great tree in the upper drawing is a mimosa tree, which shuts up its fan like leaves at night & shows bright yellow blossoms underneath, to meet the moon. It stands half sheathed in a high hedge of box & jasmine. I hope you will be able to make out where the hills are covered with wood, .. for the most part chesnut-forests, .. and certainly you will guess at the various beauty of the mountain shapes, peak behind peak. In the lower drawing, is our garden & arbour, with the perpendicular road up to us—& dont overlook the river at the bottom of the deep valley. Neither my skill, nor my paper & pencil are sufficient to show you how it shines whitely & rushes murmurously. Indeed the beauty of this place is hard to suggest to you. At every turn you have romantic bursts of scenery, & Robert who penetrated deeper into the mountains yesterday, came back in a rapture, & talked wildly about torrents, & precipices & deserted villages– An old woman met him in some solitude & exclaimed, .. “tu sei troppo curioso! tu sarai perduto in queste montagne!” [3] Oh that you were here, Arabel. It is the very place for you to enjoy. Observe the wildness of the look of the hills! The country is not cut up here with hedges as in England, not even where it is cultivated,—and these vast mountains, even in England, could not be tamed so. A spade, if planted, in one of the perpendicular sides, would fall out of itself. Yet there is room for the vintage in hollows, & where it is not too steep– And the chesnut forests have crooked roots to hang by. I am going to ride on a donkey to keep pace with Robert! As to little Baby, he is out all day, .. sometimes for hours without his hat, with his bare arms. I told Henrietta yesterday that the heat of Florence had made him paler, .. & just afterwards he came in with cheeks like roses & his eyes sparkling out of his head, .. only very dissatisfied to have to come in at all. Wilson says that he is so strong, he quite frightens her sometimes. She expects him to get down & walk away. When lying flat down on the floor, if you put out your two fingers the child will sieze them in his fists & drag himself up by them till he sits quite straight & wd stand, if he were allowed:—and he not four months old yet! Then he understands everything: he plays with Flush’s ears & talks to him. By the way, I forgot to tell you that I cant help calling him Flush, and Flush, Baby—& Robert is apt to make the same mistake– Now that he is baptized, we must try to treat him with more respect. Robert called on the minister M. Drouin [4] & was delighted with him: he is a devout man & has much Christian simplicity. He said that Robert must forgive him for asking a question, .. but, “as we were English, what were our reasons for preferring the French Lutheran to the English church”. Robert entered with detail into our reasons:—after which, he observed that we were perfectly justified & right in his opinion, & that he shd have great pleasure in baptizing our child. He seemed to understand the state of religious parties in England, & talked about them with melancholy. I hope we shall be friends when we return to Florence—. Yesterday, Mr Lever called on us, & brought the largest dog I ever saw except that memorable one of Mr Biscoe’s. [5] Just imagine Flush beginning instantly to bark at him!!—— Flush is a regular Tuscan! He knew perfectly well that it was a gentle, magnanimous dog, and so he who runs away from all the tiney curs, thought he wd show off sublimely. We had to send him out of the room. There is a hot spring here which rushes out of a rock, & Flush is washed there every day. He looks as always he does in the summer, as ill as he well can—but he is not really ill, & he enjoys the place & the coolness & the running in & out, .. which, since the last Austrian proclamation, we have had to restrain him from at Florence. Think of aunt Jane’s letter to me never reaching me! and I suspect that mine to uncle Hedley has equally ‘fallen upon evil days’, [6] as Bummy did not mention it. Explain about it for me. This morning while we were at breakfast, came a note from Sophia Cottrell, who had just arrived, to beg Robert to go about with her to look for houses—and he has gone, though by no means well today. He will be much the better, I hope & trust, for this place, and is delighted with it, just as I am. Dont think, because you see houses in the sketch, that we are in a town—there is a mere scattering of houses, & we can go out & in as if in a solitude. But when you go out & in you go up & down. Such winding paths, steps in the rock, all sorts of contrivances for climbing & losing your way. Oh Arabel, that you were here! Robert has come back & has succeeded in his house-seeking with Sophia Cottrell. She has settled at the villa .. the other village .. much less cool, Robert says, than where we are, but more accessible. [7] The Miss Tulks & she live together—& the former are to arrive today, having been detained at Lucca by the illness of the invalid. Your homœopathy, Arabel, does nothing for her, though she has been trying it this year—but the other sister declares that she is no longer obliged to take nightly immense doses of Epsom salts & that she owes this to the homœopathists. Sophia is coming to see me today, she says. While Baby was out walking today, an English gentleman passed & patted him on the arm. Flush always goes out walking with him,—but I was considerably flattered, when Robert & I met his walking party a day or two since, & Flush chose rather to go with me. Accounts from Florence mention a state of siege. Things cant continue in their present state. Here it is tranquillity itself, & they talk of the Grand Duke’s coming here. Nobody wants him, I am sure!– Living is even cheaper than at Florence—excellent butter at two pence a pound—only an Italian pound has two ounces less than the English, you will remember– We have heaps of mountain strawberries (the real Alpine) & eggs newly laid. Arabel, will you tell dear Nelly Jago that if I do not write by this post, it is not that I do not deeply sympathize with & congratulate her. I am going to write to her very soon. I wish I could do for her a little of the good she did to me under similar circumstances. It is curious how much less I seem to have suffered from depression of spirits than almost everyone else: &, now I look back upon the crisis, I am certain I have endured more pain on other occasions– For instance .. do you remember the spasms I had in Wimpole Street, when you gave me the hot brandy, [8] my own dearest Arabel? That pain was certainly three times as bad at least—only it did not last so long, .. there was the saving point: or rather it did not come & go, come & go for one & twenty hours. I dare say that many women suffer much more than I did, & I can only speak of what I felt. Mdme Biondi told me that in her belief Italian women suffer more than Englishwomen, ..
<…> [9]
What do you think she bade me give my baby when he was six months old? He is to have nothing but the sucking till then—& on the ninth of September, once a day he is to begin to have … what do you imagine? Pap made of bread & water, with salt in it, & a small tea spoonful of oil– I exclaimed & protested, but Robert insists upon it that I am “full of prejudices,” & that Mdme Biondi’s instructions are to be strictly attended to. So my only hope is that the unfortunate child will reject the unpaleatable [sic] food, proving himself the true son of his mother. For my part, nothing induces me to touch oil, whatever philosophy I may hear about it. God bless you my own, own Arabel. Write to your Ba.
Address, on integral page: Arabel.
Publication: EBB-AB, I, 263–267.
Manuscript: Gordon E. Moulton-Barrett.
1. Year provided by EBB’s reference to Pen’s age: “not four months old.”
2. i.e., Arabella’s birthday, her 36th.
3. “You are too curious! you will get lost in these mountains!”
4. Moïse Droin (see letter 2731, note 15).
6. Paradise Lost, VII, 25.
7. The Cottrells had taken a house in Bagno alla Villa.
8. We have been unable to trace any record of this specific illness.
9. A little more than a line has been obliterated after receipt, probably by Arabella.
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