3044. EBB to Mary Minto
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 129–131.
138. Avenue des Ch. Elysées.
May 21 [–22]. [1852] [1]
Your letter, dearest Mary, gave me very great pleasure indeed, and we both say in answer with earnest hearts “may God bless you & yours.” I had heard the echo of a rumour on this matter, & I even had felt half inclined to write to you, when the vagueness of the information discouraged my impulse to do so,—Arabel giving me one name & Miss Bayley another–. Why, even you yourself, Mary, dont give me a name. What can the name be? But I hope to know both name & face before long. We shall probably be in London in the course of June, & then, & then, there will be meetings as well as fastenings together, and in the former we shall have part. May God bless you, my dear Mary– [2]
Yes, there’s no happiness out of marriage,—I may testify of it to you from an experience now five years and a half deep. Love is the one divine thing, & out of this one kind of love, this love par excellence, being gradually developped those various modifications of the holy affections which have consecrated the earth, it is the very first interest of pure men & women to hold Love high & maintain it to be undiminishable. Yes indeed—as I believe in the spiritual nature of each of us, so do I believe in the endurance of Love, and that souls, once united truly, do not separate on either side the grave. I congratulate you warmly on your prospect of completing your life as a woman– Ah—it is better, Mary, than being “sister of charity” .. is it not? You always aspired a good deal .. that seemed to me a tendency in your nature .. and now I think you have touched with your finger the best fruit of the world. May God bless you and yours. I come back to that. And Robert says it, just as I do. I wonder if you have felt with any of the miraculous clearness which we have done, how God opens doors and leads us through them, when it is His will to make us happy?
Give my love to Mrs Minto, and congratulate her too, affectionately from me. I am sure she must be very much pleased.
But are you all, after all, going to call on the mountains to fall on you [3] as if you were by no means pleased? What is this scheme of burying yourselves in the country? How many heaped up honeymoons will keep you still & satisfied with the country? For my part, I passionately love pastoral scenery, mountain scenery, .. even bits of green sward, such as I saw yesterday in poor Châteaubriand’s garden which is only the mimicry of the country & not the real thing at all. [4] But I should not at all like leaving art & literature—shall you? Remember that people who live in the country are usually the least poetical of the population, & that the pastoral ideal is particularly hard to keep up. How will you do without music, and pictures? how will you do with the necessity of pigs, cabbages, and country neighbours? Then it is’nt summer all the year .. alas! .. even when one is married. You must have bare trees, and wet roads, .. and damp & cold.
Our gipsey sort of life pleases me better—I like the tent rather than the cave– But these things are matters of taste—and how delightful to discuss matters of taste, when matters of happiness are settled!
Our child has had the hooping cough, & neither Robert nor I have quite escaped the grippe– The weather all the while has been and is most brilliant, and now the darling is well–
We sate two days ago in Ary Scheffer’s studio, surrounded by his pictures, and listening to Beethoven’s music as expressed by four or five of the best performers from the Conservatoire– Whether in the body or out of the body, [5] I scarcely can tell. [6] The divine pictures seemed like visions evoked by the divine Harmonies. It was altogether our best day in Paris.
I am quite fon<d o>f Lady Elgin, & of course I shall remember to deliver your message– She is deep just now in the Rapping Spirits of America, who are coming in like a flood, she tells me, with printed statistics in hand.
God bless you comes for the third time from me & mine to you & yours–
Your affectionate Ba.
Thank you for your kind sympathy as to the poems–
<Kept by mistake.> [7]
Address: Angleterre / Miss Minto / 32. Cambridge Terrace / Hyde Park / London.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: British Library.
1. EBB may have written this letter over two days, or even three, in light of her last words: “Kept by mistake.” The letter is postmarked 23 May 1852. Her reference to hearing music at Ary Scheffer’s “two days ago” was probably written on 22 May, as the concert was held on 20 May. However, it is possible that she wrote 21 for 22.
2. Mary Minto was engaged to Augustus Alexander Ruxton (1824–89). They married in London on 14 August 1852.
3. Cf. Luke 23:30.
4. François René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) had lived for ten years in a house at Châtenay-Malabry, near Sceaux on the southwestern outskirts of Paris. He planted trees and plants from his travels to America and elsewhere, as well as from his native Britanny.
5. Cf. II Corinthians 12:2.
6. Many years later, in conversation with Daniel Curtis, RB recollected that it was the first time EBB had heard Beethoven’s quartets: “She enjoyed them highly. Wh[ich]. surprised me, as I thought we always had to go upstairs” (Diary of Daniel Sargent Curtis, 17 November 1889, ms at Marciana).
7. Passage in angle brackets was written on the back of the envelope after it was sealed.
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