Correspondence

3325.  EBB to Mary Russell Mitford

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 76–79.

Rome—— 43. Via Bocca di Leone. 3o piano.

Jany 18– [1854] [1]

It is long my ever dearest Miss Mitford since I wrote to you last—but since we came to Rome we have had troubles, out of the deep pit of which I was unwilling to write to you lest the shadows of it should cleave as blots to my pen. [2] Then one day followed another, & one day’s work was laid on another’s shoulders. Well—we are all well, to begin with, & have been well—our troubles came to us through sympathy entirely. A most exquisite journey of eight days we had from Florence to Rome, seeing the great monastery & triple church of Assissi [sic] & the wonderful Terni by the way .. that passion of the waters which makes the human heart seem so still. In the highest spirits we entered Rome, Robert & Penini singing actually .. for the child was radiant & flushed with the continual change of air & scene, & he had an excellent scheme about “tissing the pope’s foot” to prevent his taking away “mine gun” .. somebody having told him that such dangerous weapons were not allowed by the Roman police. You remember my telling you of our friends the Storys .. how they & their two children helped to make the summer go pleasantly at the Baths of Lucca. They had taken an apartment for us in Rome, so that we arrived in comfort to lighted fires & lamps as if coming home .. & we had a glimpse of their smiling faces that evening– In the morning before breakfast, little Edith was brought over to us by the manservant with a message—“The boy was in convulsions .. there was danger”. We hurried to the house of course, leaving Edith with Wilson. Too true!—all that first day was spent beside a deathbed .. for the child never rallied .. never opened his eyes in consciousness, & by eight in the evening, he was gone. In the meanwhile, Edith was taken ill at our house .. could not be moved, said the physicians. We had no room for her, but a friend of the Storys’ on the floor immediately below, Mr Page, the artist, took her in & put her to bed. Gastric fever, with a tendency to the brain—& within two days her life was almost despaired of—exactly the same malady as her brother’s. Also, the English nurse, [3] was apparently dying at the Storys’ house—and Emma Page, the artist’s youngest daughter, sickened with the same symptoms. Now you will not wonder that after the first absorbing flow of sympathy I fell into a selfish human panic about my child. Oh, I “lost my head,” said Robert,—and if I could have caught him up in my arms & run to the ends of the world, the hooting after me of all Rome would not have stopped me. I wished—how I wished .. for the wings of a dove .. or any unclean bird .. to fly away with him & be at peace. [4] But there was no possibility but to stay—also the physicians assured me solemnly that there was no contagion possible .. otherwise I would have at least sent him from us to another house. To pass over this dreary time I will tell you at once that the three patients recovered .. only in poor little Edith’s case Roman fever followed the Gastric & has persisted so, ever since in periodical recurrence that she is very pale & thin– Roman fever is not dangerous to life .. simple fever & ague .. but it is exhausting if not cut off .. and the quinine fails sometimes– For three or four days now she has been free from the symptoms, & we are beginning to hope.——

Now you will understand at once what ghastly flakes of death have changed the sense of Rome to me. The first day, by a deathbed! The first drive out, to the cemetery,—where poor little Joe is laid close to Shelley’s heart (cor cordium [5] says the epitaph) & where the mother insisted on going when she & I went out in the carriage together. I am horribly weak about such things. I cant look on the earth-side of death .. I flinch from corpses & graves, & never meet a common funeral without a sort of horror. When I look death-wards I look over death—& upwards .. or I cant look that way at all. So that it was a struggle with me to sit upright in that carriage in which the poor stricken mother sate so calmly——not to drop from the seat .. which would have been worse than absurd of me. Well—all this has blackened Rome to me. I cant think about the Cæsars in the old strain of thought—the antique words get muddled & blurred with warm dashes of modern, everyday tears & fresh grave-clay. Rome is spoiled to me—there’s the truth– Still, one lives through one’s associations when not too strong .. & I have arrived at almost enjoying some things .. the climate for instance, which though perilous to the general health, agrees particularly with me .. and the sight of the blue sky floating like a sea-tide through the great gaps & rifts of ruins. We read in the papers of a tremendously cold winter in England [6] & elsewhere, while I am able on most days to walk out as in an English summer, & while we are all forced to take precautions against the sun. Also Robert is well—and our child has not dropped a single rose-leaf from his radiant cheeks. We are very comfortably settled in rooms turned to the sun, and do work & play by turns .. having almost too many visitors .. hear excellent music at Mrs Sartoris’s (Adelaide Kemble) once or twice a week, & have Fanny Kemble to come & talk to us with the doors shut, we three together. This is pleasant– I like her decidedly– If anybody wants small talk by handfulls of glittering dust swept out of salons, here’s Mr Thackeray besides!—and if anybody wants a snow-man to match Southey’s snow-woman (see ‘Thalaba’) [7] here’s Mr Lockhart, who in complexion, hair, conversation & manners, might have been made out of one of your English “drifts” .. “sixteen feet deep in some places” says Galignani. [8] Also .. here’s your friend V .. Mrs Archer Clive. We were at her house the other evening. She seems goodnatured—but what a very peculiar person as to looks .. & even voice & general bearing .. & what a peculiar unconsciousness of peculiarity! She is said to be vehement in the hunt after “high society” in the low English sense of height. I do not know her much. I go out very little in the evening both from fear of the night air & from disinclination to stir. Mr Page, our neighbour down stairs, pleases me much—and you ought to know more of him in England, for his portraits are like Titian’s, flesh, blood & soul .. I never saw such portraits from a living hand. He professes to have discovered secrets, & plainly knows them, from his wonderful effects of colour on canvass .. not merely in words. His portrait of Miss Cushman is a miracle. [9] Gibson’s famous painted Venus [10] is very pretty—that’s my criticism. Yes, I will say beside that I have seldom, if ever, seen so indecent a statue. The colouring with an approximation to flesh-tints, produces that effect to my apprehension—— I dont like this statue-colouring—no, not at all.

Dearest dear Miss Mitford, will you write to me?– I dont ask for a long letter .. but a letter .. a letter!—& I entreat you not to prepay—among other disadvantages that prepaying tendency of yours may lose me a letter one day. I want much to hear how you are bearing the winter—how you are– Give me details about your dear self. Think that I am thinking of you anxiously—wishing to hear of your being better with my whole heart– Of course you are shut up during the cold, & that cant be good for your general health. Write to me dear dear friend!—— The London fogs have driven Mr Kenyon from Wimbledon to the Isle of Wight where he has bought a house. How is the book getting on? To have anything like a novel from you will be delightful. The dramas [11] are not out, are they? I hunt the advertisements for the name. [12] God bless you–

Ever your most affectionate

Ba.

Robert’s love

Address: Miss Mitford / Swallowfield / near Reading.

Publication: EBB-MRM, III, 400–404.

Manuscript: Wellesley College.

1. Year provided by postmark.

2. Cf. Job 31:7.

3. Jane Cartwright.

4. Cf. Psalm 55:6.

5. “Heart of hearts.” On Shelley’s tombstone in the Protestant Cemetery, the Latin words are engraved immediately under his name. There follow his life dates and a quotation from the second of Ariel’s songs in The Tempest: “Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange” (I, ii, 400–402). It was commonly believed at this time that Shelley’s heart was buried in his grave, but all first- and second-hand accounts of his burial indicate that only his ashes were placed there. The heart is said to have survived his cremation on the Tuscan coast, where it was plucked from the remains and given to Leigh Hunt. He was eventually persuaded to surrender it to Mary Shelley, “who placed it in her copy of Adonais” (Emily W. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, Boston, 1989, p. 226). After her death in 1851, the book with the heart still in it was discovered among her possessions. When the Shelleys’ son Percy Florence Shelley died in 1889, his wife Jane “buried him … with Shelley’s heart” in the family tomb at St. Peter’s church in Bournemouth (p. 395).

6. For example, a report in The Times of 5 January 1854 (p. 7) listed the coldest days recorded at an observatory near Nottingham since 1809. The coldest temperature occurred on 3 January 1854: “4° below zero.”

7. Laila, the daughter of Okba the sorcerer, lives in a region of perpetual winter; her only companions are figures of snow made by her father that melt away by nightfall (see Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, 1801, bk. X).

8. In a telegraphic despatch from Manchester, dated 4 January, it was reported that “the snow in some places … is said to be sixteen feet deep” (Galignani’s Messenger, 7 January 1854, p. 4).

9. See letter 3246, note 5.

10. See letter 3244, note 3.

11. The Dramatic Works of Mary Russell Mitford, published in July 1854. The “novel” EBB refers to, Atherton, appeared in late March 1854 as the first volume in Atherton, and Other Tales (3 vols.).

12. Hurst & Blackett, Miss Mitford’s publisher of the above-named works, began advertising Atherton in The Athenæum of 4 March 1854 (no. 1375, p. 268). Advertisements for The Dramatic Works did not appear in that journal until July.

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