3679. RB to Charles Eliot Norton

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 3–4.

[Paris]

Sunday Mg [?18] [November 1855] [1]

My dear Mr Norton,

Do believe that we are not so insensible to your kindness as we may seem:—I am wholly unable to accept your invitation for to-morrow—but it shall go hard but I will contrive to call in the course of the week & give myself the pleasure you promise me. For my wife,—she is far from well, supremely uncomfortable and shut up for the winter, I fear. But she goes with me in the grateful sympathy with which I am

My dear Mr Norton,

Yours ever faithfully

Robert Browning

(All thanks for Mr Parson’s book) [2]

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Harvard University.

1. Conjectural dating based on Norton’s presence in Paris from about 3 to 24 November 1855. He called on the Brownings on or about the 7th. In answering Norton’s invitation, RB seems to imply that he has a week to return the call. Norton was staying at the Hôtel Windsor, 38 Rue de Rivoli (see SD1876 in vol. 21 and SD1887 in this volume).

2. Poems (1854) by Thomas William Parsons (1819–92). EBB had disliked his poem “On a Bust of Dante” (see the third to last paragraph in letter 3204).

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