Correspondence

2949.  EBB & RB to William Cox Bennett

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 108–109.

Sept 23. ’51.

Dear Mr Bennett,

How good you have been this many a day & year in sending me & mine your poems—with not a few kind words in the fly-leaf of this last volume. [1] We have spent a few hurried weeks in London and leave it tomorrow for Paris—but I would .. that is, I & my wife would—not go without thanking you very heartily for your remembrance of & kind feeling toward us. Your poems have abundant evidence of the right spirit,—and some of the child-pictures [2] go to our very hearts in their truth & beauty now that we have a child of our own. I hope we shall see you one day—for I hardly count the one evening when I met you years ago as giving me a sight of you[.] Meantime take this hasty expression of our goodwill for more than it seems worth, & know us for yours very faithfully ever,

R & E B. Browning.

Address: W. C. Bennett Esq. / Croom’s Hill Grove, / Greenwich.

Publication: LRB, p. 35.

Manuscript: Eton College Library, Michael Meredith Collection.

1. Poems (1850), inscribed to “Robert Browning Esqre. and Mrs. Robert Browning with admiration of the genius of both, from the Author” (copy in private collection).

2. Perhaps RB has in mind “Baby May,” “Toddling May,” “Epitaphs for Infants,” “To My Baby Kate. A Reverie,” “Child, Pursue Thy Butterfly,” and “God is Love,” all of which appeared in Poems.

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