3758. Dante Gabriel Rossetti to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 171–172.
14 Chatham Place
Blackfriars
London.
1 April 1856
My dear Browning
These few words announce to you the important coming in a few days of an answer to your two last very kind letters; to the inditing of which a series of hourly interruptions worthy of the quest of the Dark Tower [1] have started up every evening of the past week or so. Better had I taken the witchcraft of the matter for granted at once, & put the witch’s pipe out by answering forthwith on the essential subject of the portrait. So perhaps she might have fought shy of me for a few days after, till I had accomplished a letter to you on other matters & all matters. As it is, she has her eye screwed into me, and smokes away like a chimney, & all my intentions & all my work go to muddle & decay.
One thing she shan’t balk me in though—& that is, sending your portrait by Page to the R.A. on the 7th Thither it shall wend, though it be to the Scena of the Wolf’s Glen:—owl, Sir C. Eastlake (his original character.) [2] In answer to your inquiries—as to the condition of the picture, I certainly think it has become considerably lighter since it has been opposite my window. Neither it nor the frame have suffered by carriage, but the crack you speak of is unluckily very visible & I fear not to be remedied. However it is not obtrusive. I should only be too proud after so much kind urging from Mrs Browning & yourself, to accompany Page’s picture with my sketch, [3] did I not hope, both your wills & leisures serving, to paint both of you before long in a way worthier of exhibition.
And now, how looks Sycorax? [4] Something wrong with her pipe, eh? While she coaxes it alight again, I vow I’ll find time for my letter, and get some work done to report in it too, & bilk her this time. Ah! never mind—she has a wax Guy [5] of me melting somewhere, & I shall never figure at Mdme Tussaud’s club for gods.
That you may, my dear Browning, is the gratifying wish (it’s the 1st April yet, 10 minutes to 12 P.M.) of yours most
sincerely,
D. G. Rossetti
Address: Affranchie / Robert Browning Esq / Rue du Colisée, 3 / Paris / France.
Publication: Rossetti, 2, 111–113.
Manuscript: Huntington Library.
1. An allusion to “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855).
2. Rossetti refers to Karl Maria von Weber’s opera, Der Freischütz (1821), Act II, the end of which takes place in the eerie and magical Wolf’s Glen. In staging this scene, Weber called for an “owl with flaming eyes” (Max Maria von Weber, Carl Maria von Weber, trans. J. Palgrave Simpson, 1865, II, 211).
4. A witch and the mother of Caliban in The Tempest.
5. “A person of grotesque appearance, esp. with reference to dress; a ‘fright’” (OED). This usage of the word is derived from the tradition of parading grotesquely clad effigies of Guy Fawkes on 5 November (Guy Fawkes Day) with “other similar effigies (representing unpopular persons), to which the name of ‘guys’ is often given by extension” (OED).
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