2824. EBB to Henry Fothergill Chorley
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 33–34.
[Florence]
Dec. 9th [1849] [1]
My dear Mr Chorley,
You will think .. or will you think? .. that Robert & I are always teazing you. I send you some verses (this time) which I should like to have inserted in the Athenæum, [2] if nobody else should particularly dislike it, and if you would be so very good as to see to the correctness of the printing– The verses relate to a circumstance which has much affected us, .. the death of the only child of a friend of mine here, the daughter of Mr Tulk, (late member for Sudbury) who married Count Cottrell ex-chamberlain of the Ex-Duke of Lucca. I knew her long ago in England, & we naturally fell together in Florence– Robert selected the place for the poor little grave in the beautiful English cemetery, & attended there in the place of the father, who was quite broken down by grief– Both parents doated upon the little creature! Ah, Mr Chorley, you dont understand perhaps how such brief lives can throw out such deep roots into hearts! And I did’nt only last year.
Now shall I beg you to be pedantic about the printing of the initials? AAEC. [3] And if the Athenæum wont print it at once, there is no use, you see. Which I say with a horrible scowl at Blackwood, who has behaved to me like a borderer & a thief .. I cant tell you how badly .. (in the way of keeping mss [4] for years with all sorts of complimentary turns of speech & lock) so that I have learnt to be afraid of the whole race of periodicals–
We hear dreadful rumours of dreadful books coming from you, Mr Chorley. Are those true? I wish you would write to us a little oftener & speak much of yourself <..> and I hope for some better news of your fa<m>ily than you gave us last time. As to Florence, you never mean to come to Florence as long as we are there: is’nt it settled? For my part, I begin to despair of you altogether. The Macphersons are not arrived yet, neither are Dr Emile Braun & his wife. [5] Instead of them, the cold has come, and we are feeling rather like Christmas, heaping up the pine-wood & keeping close to it when heaped up. Robert is well in health & much better in spirits, though they have never been as even as they used to be before the heavy affliction of last spring. He is writing again, to my joy– I was afraid of people <say>ing of me that I had ‘put him out’ altogether! <Th>en, we have both been pleased by his falling upon an introduction to Rossini at Bartolini’s studio, [6] which has led to various shakes of the hand & goodnatured smiles on the part of the only man of genius in Italy, & may lead perhaps to fuller intercourse. Rossini is not a ‘cochon’ [7] by any manner of means, Robert assures you. There are even persons here who have said of him ‘What a dreamy look he has’!—but it must be confessed that he is well ‘in the body’: that’s an undeniable fact. Kind & glowing in manner & countenance he is besides, & looking young enough for floods of music—he wrote a waltz the other day for a lady, which is said to be exquisite. Here’s the end of my paper.
How I should like you to see our child, who begins to understand an immense deal, with his blue eyes wide open. Dear Mr Chorley, Robert unites in regards, with
Yours ever most truly
E Barrett Browning
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Year provided by EBB’s reference to the death of Alice Cottrell.
2. EBB’s elegy on the death of Alice Cottrell, “A Child’s Grave at Florence: A.A.E.C. Born July 1848. Died November, 1849.” was published in The Athenæum for 22 December 1849 (no. 1156, p. 1304) and collected in Poems (1850).
3. EBB has printed the initials “AAEC” in large block letters.
4. i.e., “A Meditation in Tuscany” and the revised version of Prometheus Bound. The latter had probably been sent to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine before EBB left England in 1846, but evidently it was not returned until January 1850 (see letter 2829).
5. Anne Braun (née Thomson, d. 1863) and August Emil Braun (1809–56) who later published The Ruins and Museums of Rome (Brunswick, 1854).
6. Lorenzo Bartolini (1777–1850), an Italian sculptor whose works included portrait busts of Napoleon and Byron, amongst others. Rossini sat for him in June 1830 (Alan Kendall, Gioacchino Rossini: The Reluctant Hero, 1992, p. 149).
7. “Pig.”
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