3696. RB to Charles Eliot Norton
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 44–45.
Paris Rue du Colysée, 3.
Dec. 17. ’55.
My dear Norton.
You may remember the miseries we were groaning under when you saw us in those rooms without top, bottom or side, save the East-side. We only emerged thence, tolerably alive, three days ago: [1] & the first pleasant use I shall put my renewed senses to (for the cold & discomfort fairly took them away), is in paying friends any debts epistolary there was no discharging before. I take your very kind note from Avignon, & heartily thank you for the same. It was a real mortification to us—that missing you, and your family [2] with whom we should have been happy on many accounts to become acquainted: you must give us a chance of better success on your return.
I wish I could oblige Mr Stillman [3] as he requests: such wishes are pleasant & flattering. But we never write for periodicals of any sort for reasons too long to trouble you with. [4] He is wholly in error in supposing that I ever wrote a word for the London Art Journal—I might add, or ever read fifty words written therein. My wife sent some poems to “Blackwood” ten years ago: [5] and one poem, under particular circumstances, to the “Athenæum.” [6] Both of us did the same last year for the “Book of Beauty.” [7] Also, my wife contributed to Mrs Chapman’s annual: [8] that is all [9] —and I state it precisely that you may understand we would break our rule for your friend if for anybody: will you do us the additional kindness to inform him of our wishes & regrets?
Whom do you see in Rome? Our dear & great friend, Page,—in his studio, at least. How I should like to know something of his works & ways! I conjecture you made no stay at Florence in journeying, or I should try & get news of other old acquaintances. With all good wishes, from my wife as from myself, believe me ever, my dear Norton,
yours faithfully
Robert Browning.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Harvard University.
1. According to EBB, the Brownings moved on Thursday, 13 December (see the first paragraph in letter 3693). Perhaps RB is thinking of the first morning (the 14th) at 3 Rue du Colysée.
2. Norton had sailed from Boston to Liverpool in October 1855 with his mother, Catherine Norton (née Eliot, 1793–1879), and two of his sisters: Catherine Jane (1824–77) and Grace (1834–1926). They travelled to Paris, then on to Rome, where they remained during the winter of 1855–1856 (see Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, ed. Sara Norton and M.A. DeWolfe Howe, Boston, 1913, I, 136–137).
3. William James Stillman (1828–1901), American artist and journalist, who in 1855 was briefly editor of The Crayon, a New York weekly journal of art and literature that published original poems by James Russell Lowell and William Cullen Bryant. Stillman became friends with RB, Sr. and Sarianna in Paris, and he and his wife were evidently planning to join them and the poets at Fontainebleau in the summer of 1861 (see Stillman’s The Autobiography of a Journalist, Boston, 1901, I, 331). He later knew RB in London.
4. The “reasons,” of course, were RB’s own. In letter 3453 EBB wrote of their lack of means and what could be done about it: “Robert objects to my writing for the magazines, or we might have remedied the difficulty at once—and I, who dont agree in the least, yield the point like a patient Griselda, conjugally & meekly.”
5. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine published seven poems by EBB in the October 1846 issue (see letter 2626, note 7) and four sonnets in each of the issues of May and June 1847 (see letter 2655, note 9).
6. RB refers to “A Child’s Grave at Florence,” EBB’s elegy on the death of Alice Cottrell, which was printed in The Athenæum of 22 December 1849 (no. 1156, p. 1304).
7. Sic, for The Keepsake, to which EBB had contributed “My Kate”; and RB, “Ben Karshook’s Wisdom.” They appeared in the 1855 and 1856 issues, respectively.
8. EBB’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” was published in The Liberty Bell (1848), an anti-slavery annual edited by Maria Weston Chapman. EBB had recently contributed “A Curse for a Nation” to the 1856 issue, which was released in late 1855 to coincide with the annual Anti-Slavery Bazaar (see letter 3591, note 9).
9. RB must mean: “That is all since our marriage.” They had both contributed to periodicals before their marriage.
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