357. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 2, 220–221.
[Hope End]
[November 1829] [1]
My dear Mr Boyd,
I have been looking in vain for the epitaph which is not in the selection from Ben Jonson’s poetry by Campbell; [2] & this is all that I have of his works, tho’ not all that I have read. I will however try to write the epitaph down from recollection; & am not likely, I think, to be wrong except in a word or two.
“I’ll not offend thee with a vain tear more
Glad-mentioned Rowe! Thou art but gone before
Where all behind must follow; and I now
Breathe but to meet my when & make my how;
The which if gracious Heaven should grant like thine,
Who wets my grave can be no friend of mine.” [3]
If this epitaph is inferior (& you are sure to say that it is) in elegance & ingenuity & harmony to the epitaph on Lady Pembroke; [4] you will acknowledge it to be very superior in force of expression & elevation of sentiment. I scarcely ever read anything which seemed to me at once so simple & so noble.
Bro is setting out, this moment. I forgot to leave Mrs Boyd’s cloak & the music—& to ask Annie when she was coming to see us.
Ever yours
EBB——
Address, on integral page: H. S Boyd Esqr
Publication: Weaver, pp. 403–404.
Manuscript: Huntington Library.
1. Dated by EBB’s use of the familiar “Annie,” in place of the earlier “Miss Boyd.” This may have been the invitation that led to her second stay at Hope End, mentioned in the following two letters.
2. Lot 544 of Browning Collections was Thomas Campbell’s Specimens of the British Poets, with Biographical and Critical Notices (7 vols., 1819), now at ABL (Reconstruction, A564).
3. Epigram XXXIII, “On sir John Roe,” in The Works of Ben. Jonson (1756), VI, 234–235. EBB has slightly misquoted the middle lines.
4. “Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke” (op. cit., VI, 297):
“Underneath this marble herse
Lies the subject of all verse,
Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother;
Death, e’er thou hast slain another,
Learn’d and fair, and good as she,
Time shall throw his dart at thee.”
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