3157. EBB to Lady Elgin
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 299–300.
Florence.
Jany 7. [1853] [1]
My dear Lady Elgin, will you accept from my husband & myself, with your usual graciousness, this copy of Keats, & remember us a little for good by it? [2] I have delayed making the request because of the books being sent after us when we had left Paris, but Mrs Hedley will see them conveyed to you at last. May the type be found an improvement on that of the disagreeable double-columned edition, and the poet himself not seem to you the worse at all for passing through the hands of two poets less worthy.
We were very sorry not to catch a last look at you, dear Lady Elgin, on any of the ten days we spent in Paris on our way to Italy. You had vanished,—& so had the possibility of the satisfactory pain of saying ‘goodbye.’ Well!, if it please God, we shall be back into your neighbourhood; and goodday is better than goodbye at the best, and we look forward to many good days & Greek evenings with you, when we shall have a great deal of talk, I hope, about the poets, .. to say nothing of the witches & the rapping spirits. Did I not observe, when I was leaving you, that we were passing out of the sphere of the spirits? No such thing! The buzz of the spiritual world was in my ears in London too, and even here one may listen to it,—particularly when the Americans, (“trailing clouds of” [3] spiritualism where they go), pay one a passing visit. I think our first invitation in London, or almost our first, was to see Lord Stanhope’s chrystal ball—which in justice I must say, was by no means a satisfactory exhibition. Lord Stanhope assured me that “twenty spirits had been seen in it, of whom three were females.” I speak to a wise woman—judge what I say. [4] I understand that even Mrs Crowe, the author of the “Night side of nature” [5] suspects a good deal of moral twilight in the seer employed by Lord Stanhope to see the chrystalline visions.
You will lament over the decadence of the poetical profession in England when I tell you that the poets there seemed chiefly occupied in babyology … for which, you know, I have considerable weakness myself– We were invited to two great christenings, one at Mr Monckton Milnes’s where there was an only baby, and another at Alfred Tennyson’s where was an only baby too– You may imagine the amount of champagne & Mechlin lace!– In the meantime, Carlyle had wandered away out of sight, to make room for the bricklayers & painters in his house at Chelsea, so that we missed him. [6] We saw, however, many interesting people in London, & there were amends made for the detestable climate which I suffered from as usual.
Our plan, in coming to Italy, was to spend the winter in Rome—but, finding our Florentine house unlet, we settled naturally into the old warm nest, and it will be hard to leave it even in March, when we must make an effort & get on to Rome. I am very well, & we are happy & ‘at home’ where we are now. Florence is dull & dead after Paris to be sure,—but I call the dulness stillness, & the deadness repose, & it all has a charm to me. Nevertheless we shall be back at Paris,—you will see! So try not quite to forget us in the meanwhile for we hold strongly by your kind feelings, believe me. With my husband’s cordial regards, let me
remain, dear Lady Elgin,
very affectionately yours
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Year derived from EBB’s reference to the Tennyson christening, which took place on 5 October 1852.
3. Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807), line 64.
4. Cf. I Corinthians 10:15.
5. Catherine Ann Crowe (née Stevens, 1790–1872), was a successful novelist by this time, but her collection of stories dealing with somnambulism and hypnotism, The Night Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost Seers (1848), became her “most popular work, running to many editions up to 1904” (ODNB).
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