3135. RB to James Russell Lowell
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 244.
[London]
[11 October 1852] [1]
My dear Mr Lowell,
We are in the crisis of departure. You must take our hastiest as well as best thanks for all your kind feeling to us: it can hardly be but we shall meet again.
Mr Landor is at Bath, and, I believe, likely to be. You need no introduction, I think, to one of the most genial of men as well as greatest of modern poets. Should you please to require a formal presentation, however, I am sure his goodness to me will extend itself to you, and for once be rewarded.
My wife’s kindest regards and wishes go with mine to Mrs Lowell & yourself.
Ever yours faithfully
Robert Browning
It strikes me, if you will have the goodness to tell me what the redoubtable Centofanti made you pay for your Rooms at Florence, I shall have a sure test in my power of his general veracity. [2] Could you let me know this by a line to me <“aux soins [3] de M. Jebb Dyke, 36 Rue de Ponthieu à Paris,”> [4] —or no, for our stay is very short—then, at Poste Restante, Florence. But you must put in news of yourself and Mrs Lowell, or I shall demur at my postage. Good bye, once more, from the heart.
Will you charge yourself with a letter from my wife to Mr Mathews? [5]
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection.
1. Year provided by RB’s reference to the Lowells’ stay at Casa Guidi (see note 2). Day and month are suggested by RB’s statement: “We are in the crisis of departure.”
2. The Lowells stayed at Casa Guidi from 26 August to 30 October 1851 (see Horace Elisha Scudder, James Russell Lowell: A Biography, 1901, I, 314).
3. “Care of.”
4. RB has crossed out the information in angle brackets. Richard Jebb Dyke (b. 1817) had married in 1846 at Paris RB’s cousin Louisa Jane Browning (1826–80), daughter of William Shergold Browning (1787–1874) and his wife Louisa (née Mansir, 1796–1863).
5. Cornelius Mathews of New York, with whom EBB corresponded from 1842 to 1847. No letters from a later period are extant.
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