2867. EBB to David & Eliza Anne Ogilvy
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 16, 162–166.
Florence
July 13th [1850] [1]
Thank you, thank you, both our dear friends, for your kindness in letting us have your experience at Capri & elsewhere. And, dear Mrs Ogilvy, you were not well enough, I grieve to think, to have written this kind letter without some effort, for which I ought to thank you doubly. It is right & wise that you should have made over little Marcia to a balia; and as really you have done duty by her most nobly for six months, there is no surrender of maternal office, .. you have nursed her, to all intents & purposes, .. and it is much the same whether a balia or a cow does the mere finishing stroke .. is’nt it? Now I hope you are beginning or rather have begun to recover your strength & to lose all trace of nervous headaches & other disorders– Oh, I wish we could enjoy Capri with you, it must be so enjoyable from what you say of it, and I should like so to be with you there & to look at the darling children & see Alexander old enough & noisy enough to be ‘scolded’! Wiedeman would be delighted to swear eternal friendship to anybody with a genius for mischief. But the truth is that we cant go to Capri—no, it is an impossibility! With a hundred pounds to take us on to the end of the year, we are really forced to stay in Tuscany, and even Leghorn escapes us through being too expensive. We have been full of schemes ever since Mr Ogilvy was here. A villa four miles from Vallombrosa .. Siena, .. Leghorn, Viareggio, .. not a scheme was without objection. Robert went to Siena by himself to see if one could find any sort of nest there, .. went at seven by the train, intending to return at seven .. and I let him go in a resigned state of mind enough, not feeling quite up to going with him & thinking it necessary for Baby that we shd get out of the heat somehow. It was the first time for these four years he had been away from me longer than three hours at longest, and I felt all day as if I had lost my heart or some more vital part, & kept exalting myself at intervals upon my heroic virtue, in making no more fuss about it than I did. But heroic virture never is properly recompensed in this world—and the crafty people at Siena had suspended the trains, the return trains, in honor of their corso, [2] & in order to keep their visitors through the night. I went to bed in despair at twelve oclock, not understanding that the trains were stopped, imagining rather that he had been too late for the last .. “and yet that was so unlike Robert!” At three in the morning his voice was under the window—he had come back in a baroccino, [3] dreadfully tired, & could’nt make the porter hear with ever so much thumping at the gates, though I heard at the first word said softly, & made everybody else hear, as you may suppose, in a moment more. As to Siena, whether he saw things as they are or a little disfigured (which is possible) by his wrath against the trains, he declared that it struck him as the most detestable town in Italy & the least to be inhabited .. even the cathedral was talked down to the ground. Then we quite fixed upon ‘Gombo’, the seaside fortress in the Pisan forest, where there are two or three houses and coolness & beautiful wood-walks, & good sands & bathing, .. & just as we were about to set off, the Gordon children met Robert & told him that “Mama had found out such a delightful place .. Gombo .. & thought of going there”. Which changed our plan of necessity, & now we are looking wildly on all sides for a place of refuge. I cared more about it a few days ago than I do now .. for now we have wonderfully cool days, & Wiedeman who was beginning to make me quite unhappy with the sight of a pale little face, has recovered his colour, & sleeps at night instead of tossing about in the heat. He did not cry, he kept his inexhaustible spirits, but certainly, though Robert declared that I imagined half of it, he looked as delicate as possible, & his arms had lost much of their firmness & roundness. Oh no, dearest Mrs Ogilvy! he is not “splendid” by any means. Mr Ogilvy relieved & delighted me by appearing so struck with his growth, and indeed he is much grown, and a sweet little engaging child, we think him, with the funniest fancies & tricks, & a spirit of joy always at overflow. I never saw such an ecstatical little creature. When he hears music, he clasps his hands, & beats his face & head with his fists, breaking out into laughter at intervals, as if it was too strong for him & he was losing his senses in the gladness of it. Robert says to me sometimes .. ‘Ba, I do hope that child is not going mad’. Think of his making his way into the Austrian band the other evening at the Cascine, & wanting to sieze on the drum, .. to play on it himself! There’s shyness for you! He is the “vergognoso di Pisa”! [4] Still what people remark generally of him is, “What a little thing, to be running about”,—and I am sure he is not half the size of Alexander at his age. He looks like a small Puck in a mushroom, with his round hat on .. and to see him dancing & singing, is as amusing at least as the corso at Siena was to poor Robert—the dance consisting of a series of curtsies accompanied by most curious gesticulation & performed in an absolute “faith in Art”—Taglioni could’nt have had more. [5] Oh yes, I was certain that you wd feel for poor Sophia Cottrell. She bore up dauntlessly at first & then sank suddenly into such a state of nervous prostration .. lying with shut eyes & not bearing a sound .. that her husband was in alarm & carried her away to Leghorn where she soon revived & is now in Florence much better. He could’nt make out why the change of place became so necessary, or why she had caught up a nervous hatred against the house where she had suffered—“he never could understand how external impressions should overpower one so”. My wonder is how she can live on, sleep & eat, in that house, at all. I lived a year, in a house, after the greatest affliction of my life, [6] because my family naturally listened to the medical man who “thought I might die in the act of being carried down stairs” .. and I cannot look back to any month or week of that year without horror, & a feeling of the wandering of the senses. Places are ideas, and ideas can madden or kill. The poor little Cottrell baby was born with diseased lungs, in consequence, it is supposed, of a cold taken by the mother during her journey—yes indeed—she had better have stayed in Florence. Madme Biondi doubts whether she is strong enough at present to give birth to a healthy child, & hopes that there may be a long pause. Very sad it is, altogether!– I had a letter a few days since from Miss Mitford who announces that ten days previously, Tennyson had married a clergyman’s daughter. She had not seen this piece of news in the papers, but had heard it, she said, on good authority & through Moxon. She is not acquainted herself with Mr Moxon, so it may’nt be true, though I hope with all my heart it is—for no one would gain more from a happy marriage than Tennyson would, as far as I can understand his nature & his habits– She speaks very coldly of his new book—which however is no argument to me against its excellence. She is a woman of high general cultivation, & full of poetical sensibility & enthusiasm, and yet I never count upon her in poetry, of which, in my mind, she does not apprehend the essential qualities– She sees secondary & incidental qualities .. forms & colours .. but the pure essence escapes her. To which she would answer, that I was full of crotchets & sectarianisms & given to trample down all the rose-gardens of the world in a search for essences—and more was the pity for my own verses! I have not had sight of the Athenæum extracts [7] —(the Athenæum went from me with you,) but Robert, too, spoke much to me of the beauty & pathos of thought expressed in them. I dare say it is an exquisite book, for he is a divine poet if ever there was such divinity. Has Mrs Ogilvy told you of her kindness (will you thank her for me & give her our love?) in writing to me from Spezzia, under the impression of its enchanting scenery & with the evident wish that you all as well as ourselves wd go there. Only her account (aiding our recollections) [8] of the extravagant terms, put such a scheme out of the question. In the impulse of the moment I began to write to you & copied out half her letter .. & then suddenly remembered that I was quite ignorant of your address till you shd send it. Yes—‘little Browning’ had dear Cuckoo’s message & so had Wilson—& both send back their love! How pretty Alexander must look with his curls! Wiedeman too has curls, I assure you. Now do write to me & dont mind Mr Ogilvy!—though I sympathize so deeply in your joy at having him back! And dont call it a contradiction if I was very glad to see him here notwithstanding. God bless you all! With Robert’s love, let me remain
your ever affectionate
E B Browning
The enemy seems to withdraw, & perhaps after all we may go to Gombo. But direct as usual.
Address, on integral page: À Madame / Mde Ogilvy, / Hôtel Rispoli, / Sorrento, / Napoli.
Publication: EBB-EAHO, pp. 15–21.
Manuscript: Eton College Library.
1. Year provided by postmark.
2. “Races”; see letter 2864, note 8.
3. “Light two-wheeled cart.”
4. “Shy one of Pisa.” According to Murray’s, this expression derives from a figure in a painting by Spinello Spinelli in the Campo Santo in Pisa entitled “The Cultivation of the Vine, and the Drunkeness of Noah”: “In the left-hand corner of this fresco is the well-known figure of a female pretending to cover her face with her hand, but slily peeping through her fingers, which has given rise to the phrase of “Come la Vergognosa del Campo Santo” (Hand-Book for Travellers in Northern Italy, 1847, p. 455).
5. Marie Taglioni (1809–84), the prima ballerina of her day, had retired by this time. “Her dancing was acclaimed as ‘the poetry of motion’ from St. Petersburg to Madrid” (DNB). We have been unable to trace the source of “faith in Art.”
6. The death of her brother Edward in July 1840, following which EBB remained at 1 Beacon Terrace, Torquay, until she returned to London in September 1841.
7. A notice of In Memoriam appeared in The Athenæum of 15 June 1850. Introducing extracts from the poem, the reviewer declared: “So deep is the basis of earnestness in the strains which we are about to quote, that we feel no sense of hyperbole when the Poet demands that the very elements shall be solemnized in sympathy while the freight of death passes over the waters” (no. 1181, p. 629). The reviewer is given as John Westland Marston in the marked file copy of The Athenæum now at City University (London).
8. The Brownings had travelled to La Spezia the previous summer; see letter 2797.
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