3882. EBB to Hughina Barclay Macdonald
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 85–86.
39. Devonshire Place.
October. 11– [1856] [1]
Dear Miss Macdonald, [2]
Your book [3] & letter waited long for my return to England: & then I was siezed upon by accumulated engagements to such an absorbing degree, that I suffered myself to wait on for breathing-room before I thanked you for your gift & your kind words.
I see in your little volume much pure aspiration, & much feeling of the eye, ear, & heart– I will not say it is enough for receptiveness with the public– I do not indeed think so– Art is a higher, harder thing, than any of us have thought when we were young writers—and the young who desire to produce artistically, must be prepared to labour patiently. Poets do not sing as the birds sing: they must learn to destroy as well create, and to wait long .. perhaps in the cold.
I say this, who have, for my own part, written & printed too early & impatiently, for anything else but repentence .. in relation to certain of my verses. Therefore I say this to you the more freely, because I cannot suspect myself of saying it arrogantly.
May God bless you & prosper you both in literature .. if you prosecute letters .. and in the better & happier fruits of an earnest life. We are going to Italy immediately. I thank you heartily for your most kind sympathy–
very faithfully yours
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Eton College Library.
1. Year provided by reference to the return address.
2. Hughina Barclay Macdonald (1817–1874), daughter of John Duff Macdonald, Lieutenant R.N., and his wife, Catherine (née Smith, 1794–1880), was born in Cromarty, Scotland, and died in Hamilton, Ontario. A number of her verses can be found in issues of The Metropolitan in the early 1840’s; for example, “Eulalia’s Jewels” (July 1842, pp. 351–352) and “Even Song” (September 1842, p. 67).
3. Presumably, H.B. Macdonald, Abdul Medjid: A Lay of the Future. And Other Poems (Edinburgh and London, 1854). A brief notice of it in The Athenæum of 21 April 1855 contained the following comment: “This book is an instance of a poet, not without fancy and capacity, who warbles with much of Mrs. Hemans’s tenderness and plaintiveness, but with little condensed force; there is a musical hurry about the lines and a diffuse haste that give the poetry an air of being the result of a momentary feeling hastily versified” (no. 1434, p. 460).
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