3057. EBB to Louisa Caroline Stewart-Mackenzie
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 159–160.
138 Avenue des Champs Elysées
June 27. [1852] [1]
It touched me very much, dearest Miss Mackenzie, that you should have written to me in the midst of so absorbing an anxiety & grief. [2] Indeed I love you & think of you, .. and if an affectionate sympathy could do anything where God must do all, I should have less diffidence in talking to you about mine. Let me say at least that if the worst of your fears should pass into a reality, I shall know how to feel for you—too well, too well–
For the rest, may God bless you & soften to you whatever grief He shall send. When our fears have done their sorest, comes the time of His hopes—it is for that, He permits the others. As to Love we never lose love, because it is divine as Himself. He has called himself by its name to prove so. We go & come, but there is no farewell between those who love one another purely, naming Christ’s name, .. only a short apparent parting, .. & not a handsbreadth of distance, perhaps, if we could see.
I am writing from the tone caught from your letter, &, after all, it may be other than you apprehend. So many bad cases I have known in my own experience, where a sudden turn has taken place, & the invalid has sprung back again into life, to the astonishment of his physicians as well as of his friends. What joy it would be to me to have a better account! Will you write it to me if you can? And will you believe that, however it shall be, few more affectionate thoughts than mine belong to you, whether you claim a glad thought or a sad one? We have not, it is true, met very often—but there are instincts, .. are there not? .. & when my instincts tell me, I am apt to be forward in love. My husband & I have felt a warm interest in you from the beginning, & shall to the end, I am quite sure. So bear us somewhere dangling to the ends of your heart, & dont cut us off lest we should catch in the hedges & be in the way–
Miss Stirling bids me enclose this note, as she is too much occupied, she says, to write an independent letter. Mrs Jameson talked too of writing a word to you, and if she does, I will put that in, too. And I take a kiss from Baby to slip in at the side. We are meaning to go to London .. perhaps in a week, perhaps in a fortnight .. which, it may be, depends on a letter—but, either way, we hope to see you in London to make amends for the atmospheric drawbacks of the place. Here, there has been showery weather, but a lovely warm air, with floods of intervening sunshine. I rather shrink from taking my child out of the garden holiday time he has here, to shut him up in the streets—but what must be, must be.
Robert bids me say that he will do anything you like .. you are to command him as to dogs & men. For the present he does nothing, since you desire it.
We were at Miss Stirling’s last night & heard exquisite music .. Chopin & Mozart. The Scheffer’s were there, & the Polish poet (& prophet, I understand) Mickiewicz, [3] & a Swiss poetess, [4] & Lady Elgin. All your friends talked with deep interest of you–
Will you give our united regards to Mrs Stewart Mackenzie,—& believe, for yourself, how I shall ever be, with true & tender thoughts & a ‘God bless you’ from the heart, your affectionate
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Publication: Virginia Surtees, The Ludovisi Goddess: The Life of Louisa Lady Ashburton (Salisbury, 1984), p. 43 (in part).
Manuscript: National Library of Scotland.
1. Year provided by EBB’s reference to Louisa Stewart-Mackenzie’s ailing brother (see note 2).
2. George Augustus Frederick Stewart-Mackenzie (1824–52), third and youngest son of James Alexander Stewart-Mackenzie and his wife Mary Elizabeth Frederica (née Mackenzie), was terminally ill. He died on 15 July 1852 at 11 Rutland Gate, Hyde Park. His death was announced in The Times of 17 July.
3. Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), Polish poet, had lived in Paris since 1832 and was appointed to the chair of Slavic literature at the Collège de France in 1840 but was suspended in 1844 owing to his radical views on politics and religion. Along with Michelet and Quinet he was dismissed from the college, though he had not lectured there since his suspension. He went to Rome briefly in 1848, where he tried to raise Polish troops in support of Italian liberation. He met and became friends with Margaret Fuller, and soon after returning to Paris, he established La Tribune des Peuples, a short-lived (March-November 1849) socialist newspaper (see Adam Mickiewicz: Poet of Poland, ed. Manfred Kridl, New York, 1951).
4. Caroline Olivier (née Ruchet, 1803–79), born at Aigle in the Swiss canton of Vaud. She and her husband Juste Daniel Olivier (1807–76), also a poet, published a volume of verse together, Les deux voix (Lausanne, 1835). The Oliviers had been living in Paris since 1846 and remained there until after the Franco-Prussian war when they returned to Switzerland. They were close friends of Adam Mickiewicz.
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