3037. EBB to Dinah Mulock
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 100–101.
138 Avenue des Champs Ely.
April. 27– [1852] [1]
I am really afraid– You must think me .. what can you have thought of me for not immediately answering a letter which brought the tears both to my eyes and my husband[’]s–? I was going to write just so—but he said, “No, do not write yet– Wait till we get the book and then you can speak of it with knowledge.” And I waited.
But the misfortune is that Messrs Chapman & Hall waited too, and that up to the present time the “Head of the Family” [2] has not arrived– Mr Chapman is slow in finding what he calls his “opportunities.”
Therefore I cant wait any more, no indeed. The voice which called “Dinah” in the garden,—which was true, because certainly I did call from Florence with my whole heart to the writer of those verses [3] —(how deeply they moved me!) will have seemed to you by this time as fabulous as the garden itself .. and we had no garden at Florence, I must confess to you, .. only a terrace facing the grey wall of San Felice church, where we used to walk up and down on the moonlight nights. But San Felice was always a good saint to me, and when I had read & cried over those verses from the Athenæum (my husband wrote them out for me at the Reading room) and when I had vainly written to England to find out the poet, and when I had, all as vainly, on our visit to England last summer, enquired of this person & that person, it turns out after all that “Dinah” answers me– Do you not think I am glad?
The beautiful verses touched me to the quick. So does your letter. We shall be in London again perhaps in two months for a few weeks, and then you will let us see you I hope .. will you not? and in the meanwhile you will believe that we do not indeed think of you as a stranger– Ah—your dream flattered me in certain respects!—yet there was some truth in it as I have told you, even though you saw in the dreamlight more roses than were growing.
Certainly Mr Chapman will at last send me the Head of the Family, and then I will write again of course.
Dear Miss Mulock, may I write myself down now .. because I must ..
affectionately yours, & gratefully
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Publication: LEBB, II, 67–68.
Source: Transcript in editors’ file.
1. Year provided by reference to the return address; the only April in which the Brownings resided at 138 Avenue des Champs Élysées occurred in 1852.
2. Issued in the second week of December 1851, The Head of the Family (1852) was dedicated to EBB; see letter 2998, note 2.
3. Dinah Mulock’s sonnet “To Elizabeth Barrett Browning on Her Later Sonnets” was published in The Athenæum on 15 February 1851 (no. 1216, p. 191).
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