355. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 2, 217–219.
[Hope End]
Thursday Morng. [Docket: October 1829]
My dear Mr Boyd,
I am very much obliged to you for taking so much trouble about my elegy, & am still more pleased by the opinion which you indulgently express respecting the greater part of it. [1] You are quite right with regard to the want of variety in the pauses on the first page. I had observed that the exordium was sluggish & inanimate; but I did not observe the cause, until you spoke about the pauses, which I will attend to better, another time. I have seldom been satisfied with the beginnings of any of the short poems of my writing,—& compare myself to a lame horse belonging to a neighbour of ours, which requires to be warmed by exercise before it can go well. I never shewed this elegy to any one except you—not even to Papa. As to printing it in a magazine, you know it can be printed in my own book,—& that will do as well.
You will think me very idle when I tell you that the Apologetic is not finished yet. But the Oration on Eutropius, [2] is; I have read it twice,—& I have besides, been reading a little of Longinus’s treatise [3] every day, of which I had previously read only one or two chapters. His style is very rough unflowing & inharmonious,—but the Sun lays on the rocks—& the brilliancy of his imaginative powers dazzles you so much, as almost to prevent your perceiving the roughness & cragginess. I hope he is considered difficult—for I am obliged to look at the Latin every five minutes. As to the Oration on Eutropius, it has of course delighted me extremely. It is very beautiful, more beautiful than any one can say .. in English .. without the ατος-s [4] of the Greek superlatives. But it has weakness—has it not? weakness occasioned not merely by repetition, but by a super-abundance of supererogatory epithets. Making allowances for the difference & inequality of the languages, I think that your translation is finer than the original, if I consider it generally: in one or two passages, your habit of inversion makes you a little stiff & rigid, which your original never is; & I don’t like your hippodromes. [5] But Chrysostom’s weaknesses are less visible in your translation; & in several passages, you rise superior to him, in every way. I will mention two—the one, where you say that to compare the transitoriness of human things to the vapour, the flower &c—would be to stamp a dignity upon it [6] —& the other, where you speak of the eyes of Theodosius as being “the gentlest eyes that ever wept.[”] [7] I have always very much admired these expressions, & look for them in Chrysostom, in vain!– The beautiful passage near the beginning, likening the passagery glory of Eutropius to the dream, the flower, the shadow, & vapour, [8] is evidently taken from another beautiful passage in Gregory, in the Oration on Cæsarius—but Chrysostom’s imitation is unquestionably more beautiful than Gregory’s original.
I return Mr Barker’s letter. I shewed it to Papa; but he seems to think that he can do nothing about it. I think that he does not know many persons likely to be much interested in a work of the kind,—& I am sure I [9] do not. There is not a literary person of whom I ever heard, within 20 miles of this house excepting yourself & Dr Card. I was thinking the other day (why should I say the other day?) whether it would have been possible, in the case of my never having known you, for me to have known half as much Greek as I do now—half as much as I do now, in consequence of your kindness in directing me to different authors,—besides the kindness of giving me direct instruction! I need not say that my conclusion was a negative one—nor that
I remain, dear Mr Boyd
Your ever sincere friend & grateful
E B Barrett.
Address, on integral page: H. S. Boyd Esqr / Woodland Lodge / Gt Malvern.
Docket, in unidentified hand: Oct 1829.
Publication: EBB-HSB, pp. 79–80 (in part).
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. “To the Memory of Sir Uvedale Price, Bart.”
2. Chrysostom’s “In Eutropium Eunuchum, Patritum et Consulem,” pronounced at St. Sophia’s, Constantinople, A.D. 399 (MPG, 52, 389–396).
3. i.e., De Sublimitate.
4. The suffix indicating the superlative form.
5. In his translation of the Oration on Eutropius, Boyd wrote of “the acclamations which resounded in the hippodromes, and the flattery of the spectators” (pp. 91–92 in the 1813 edition of Select Passages).
6. This passage reads: “To call them a blade of grass, a smoke, a dream, a flower, would be to stamp a dignity upon them, for they are less than nothing!” (op. cit., pp. 97–98).
7. “But when they still thirsted to avenge their sovereign … pouring at length a fountain of tears from the gentlest eyes that ever wept … he thus appeased their fury” (op. cit., p. 109).
8. “They were the vision of a night, and the illusion of a dream; but when the day returned, they were blotted from existence: they were flowers of the spring; but when the spring departed, they were all withered: they were a shadow, and it passed away: they were a smoke, and it was dissolved: they were bubbles of water, and they were broken: they were a spider’s web, and it was torn” (op. cit., pp. 92–93).
9. Underscored twice.
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