3823. Mary Howitt to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 14.
The Hermitage
Highgate Rise
Wednesday [23 July 1856] [1]
My dear Mrs Browning
Your letter gave us great pleasure even though it denied our request, & I had no idea that so many days would have passed when I recd it before we should have had the pleasure of calling on you. But a concurrence of circumstances has set in against us which day after day, & yet for three days to come will prevent our seeing you. And though this matters little to you it does to us & I cannot be easy in my mind without telling you so, lest you should think us less in any rut than we are. We hope therefore now to call on you next Sunday afternoon [2] & then will ask you to spend an old-fashioned evening with us some day next week which, if all turns out as we hope, will be our last week at home for the present.
You do not know with what pleasure we think of seeing you—& with many good wishes for you both
I am dear Mrs Browning
Yours sincerely
M Howitt
Have you seen Harris’s Poem—the Lyric of the Golden Age?– [3] If you have, did you not admire & love his portraiture of the great poet of the future– The poet & his wife—I thought of you [4] -- Is it not beautiful[?]
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Dated by Mrs. Howitt’s proposal to visit EBB “next Sunday afternoon.” In letter 3829 EBB reports: “Mary Howitt came to see me the other day.”
2. i.e., 27 July 1856.
3. Cf. Thomas Lake Harris (1823–1906), A Lyric of the Golden Age (New York, 1856), one of the works in which Harris demonstrated his spiritualist philosophy. In the introduction, it is claimed that parts of the poem were variously dictated to the author by Byron, Keats, Shelley, Rousseau, among others.
4. Mrs. Howitt may have in mind the following from Harris’s book:
The great World-Poet shall be he whose being
Glowing with truth as a white sun with light,
An angel and a spirit and a man,
Inheriting the three-fold universe,
Ranging through all of them with equal flight,
Companioned by a woman like himself,
And through her interflowing life made strong
And free and doubly beautiful, shall write,
While earth shall wake and heaven rejoice to hear (pp. 127–128).
___________________
