2986. Thomas Noon Talfourd to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 202–204.
Russell Square, London,
22 December 1851
My dear Browning,
I am very glad my little effusion gratified you– I heartily wish it were more worthy of its theme and of my own feelings respecting it. When I was at Vevày in the autumn of last year, the panolpy [sic] of clouds which attended the sunset, and the gentle effect of the rising moon on the sky, suggested to me the consolation which your genius renders in the deprivation of our lower world of the poets whom I have personally known—of Scott, Shelley, Lamb, Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth—and I thought I would one day try to express the notion in a Sonnet. But Sonnet writing is a hard grammatic exercise in the English language to one so little inspired as myself; and it was not till I saw a kindred glory at Margate in late October, that I tried to hammer out the thought, if such it deserves to be called, in lines. It is a poor affair; but it expresses a feeling, more or less intelligently, which I would put into an Affidavit, and swear to in the plainest prose. I am sure that you are possessed of as rich a vein of thought and feeling as any poet of a day rich in poets—that which is just past—for now, there is no one left but Tennyson whom you could own as a Competitor—unless you find one very near and dear to you. I am glad to know that you are editing some remains of one of the greatest of our dead poets for my friend Moxon; but I trust you will allow this only to be a preface to justice to yourself—in a poem or tragedy—or rather both in one—which will fulfil all that Macaulay vowed for.
Moxon is about to bring out a new Edition of my Dramas & Sonnets [1] in a better form than the small volume to which they have been confined of late years; and, in that, I shall have the pleasure of introducing the Sonnet to you, & thus blending my feelings with your fame. Meanwhile I send it to you—corrected a little—from that you have seen in the “Household Words.”
Ever truly yours
T N Talfourd
[Continued on integral page]
Sonnet
To Robert Browning
Suggested by a sunset of unusual beauty
A mighty sorrow gathers while the eye
Is by the sunset’s waning glories fed,
For they revive the thought of poets dead
Who with the noblest of past ages vie,
And lately veil’d by earth’s horizon shed
Sad beauty from beneath it; yet a power,
Like yon pale moon, that to their lustrous hour
Gave the mild tribute of a young ally
More felt than own’d, consoling light should shower
From crystal urn that holds the precious dower
Of Browning’s genius—which when breezes rend
Soft clouds its lavish splendors glorify,
Made free of azure fields, its course shall wend
To high dominion in our purest sky.
T N Talfourd
1851
Address: Mr Browning / 138 Avenue des Champs Elysées / Paris.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Reading Central Library.
1. See 2978, note 6.
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