2955. RB to Coventry Patmore

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 112–113.

[London]

[24 September 1851] [1]

Dear Mr. Patmore.

I had the favor of your call some time ago—the miserable hurry in which the few weeks of my stay here have been spent, must be the only excuse to your kindness for having failed altogether in more than one honest intention to get to you & acknowledge it in person. But I hope ere very long to return to England (which I leave tomorrow) & to enjoy that and many other pleasures that circumstances have made impossible now. My old admiration for your genius continues unabated of course,—but why, why have you not ere this turned it pale, as only yourself could, by the side of some as genuine new delight at some as unmistakeable a manifestation as the first? [2] So wonders my wife, too[,] who is as truly your well-wisher, Dear Mr Patmore,

as yours ever faithfully,

R Browning

Publication: Basil Champneys, Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore (London, 1900), pp. 315–316.

Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.

1. Dated by RB’s references to his brief stay in England and his departure “tomorrow.”

2. Nine years separated Patmore’s first book of poetry, Poems (1844), from his second, Tamerton Church-Tower and Other Poems (1853).

___________________