3836. Leigh Hunt to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 29–30.
Hammersmith–
August 15. ’56
Dear Robert Browning,
My wish to come to Devonshire Place as soon as I could, made me forget a sort of engagement which I have here on Monday next, and which, though it may come to nothing, I feel that I should not forego. If not inconvenient therefore to yourself or to Mrs Browning, I will say, if you please, instead of Monday at six, Tuesday at six. If otherwise, will you fix another day for me as soon after it as possible, Wednesday excepted, on which day I have also a home engagement?
The prospect of passing an evening with you two gives me more pleasure than I will tell you on paper, lest it should seem to force you to write some response. And for similar reasons I will reserve, till I see you, my thanks for the precious inscription which you have been so good to me as to put in your books. [1]
Being a “glutton of books,” [2] you will not wonder that I shall lose no scrap of the dainty fare in those.
The capillary attractions have been laid up with their illustrious brethren. [3]
With respects to the good Sister and to Dipoetagonos, [4] I am, dear Robert Browning (notwithstanding the look of levity in that compound, in which there is very respectful gravity nevertheless)
Your truly obliged
and affectionate friend,
Leigh Hunt.
Address: Robert Browning Esqre / 39 Devonshire Place, / Portland Place.
Publication: Luther A. Brewer, My Leigh Hunt Library, the Holograph Letters (Iowa City, 1938), p. 361.
Manuscript: University of Iowa.
1. As indicated by Leigh Hunt in letter 3839, he had received “five volumes” from RB. Presumably, these were Poems (2 vols., 1849), Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850), and Men and Women (2 vols., 1855). A presentation copy of Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, now at Syracuse, is inscribed by RB: “To Leigh Hunt with the affectionate veneration of Robert Browning. August, 1857 [sic, for 1856].”
2. Hunt had described himself thus in The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, with Reminiscences of Friends and Contemporaries, (1850), I, 255.
3. Hunt refers to his collection of locks of hair, which included those of Keats, Shelley, Milton, Napoleon, and now the Brownings. Regarding the Milton lock, Hunt gave a portion of it to the Brownings at Hammersmith on 13 July 1856; see RB to H. Buxton Forman, 31 July 1882, ms at Pforzheimer; see also Reconstruction, H482. Hunt’s collection of locks is now at the University of Texas at Austin. He explains the chain of ownership towards the end of letter 3949.
4. Hunt has coined a Greek word, meaning “the seed of two poets”; that is, Pen Browning.
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