Correspondence

3857.  EBB to Charles Sabine

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 52.

West Cowes

9 September 1856

Offered for sale by Maggs, Catalogue 339, August 1915, item 1102, and in Park Bernet’s Catalogue, 17 May 1968, lot 20. 1 p., 16mo. EBB regrets delay in answering Sabine [1] and writes: “Of course my reply can be only one,—that my poem of ‘Cowper’s Grave’ is much at your service & that I am sincerely touched by what you say to me in relation to that poem. [2] It was good of you to give me pleasure by such words.” EBB goes on to thank Sabine for the gift of a small book, Christian Experiences Softly Spoken.

1. Charles Sabine (1796–1859), of Oswestry, writer of religious works and verse, including A Little Book for Our Little People (1849) and The Jewel and Star (1855). We have been unable to trace the title mentioned below.

2. We have been unable to determine to what “service” Sabine put EBB’s “Cowper’s Grave” (1838). However, his obituary in The Oswestry Advertiser of 15 June 1859 states: “Those who witnessed it will not forget how Mrs Browning’s piece on Cowper’s Grave, coming to him for the first time at an hour of personal bereavement, moved him like an inspiration” (reprinted in Charles Sabine and Margaret Elizabeth Sabine, Verse, ed. William H.W. Sabine, 2 vols., Hollis, New York, 1968, I, xxiv).

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