3879. EBB to Julia Martin
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 82–83.
39 Devonshire Place.
Thursday– [9 October 1856] [1]
Thank you, my dearest Mrs Martin, though so late, for your breath of affection & sympathy at Taunton. Both Henrietta & I felt it much, & it entered into our joy of being together. I knew you would be glad for us. Also, though the first pleasure was brief, there remains a real satisfaction to me, in Henrietta’s happiness in her husband & children, & green little home, which nothing but sight could have given me in its fulness. Do you know, Surtees Cook appeared, to the greatest advantage?—honest, brave, upright, & most tender & earnest in his domestic relations. I never expected to like him so much. Henrietta seems the crown of life [2] to him, & he is as full of ‘admiration’ apparently, as before marriage– He told us in quite a pretty way of naïveté, that somebody had observed she looked just eighteen!– “Why, she is eighteen! she’s eighteen to all intents & purposes. Its only a mistake of the years.” The little girl kept her birthday [3] in a wreath of roses he had bought for the occasion—& he kissed her & wished her to be “as good as her mother,” just as if that were the highest of benedictions with him. Altogether I was happy to see them all so happy. The children are sweet, .. intelligent children—the last baby a baby of Anak [4] .. too large at five months, for me to carry about, I who used to carry my own child at past two. We were at Taunton a day more than a week, & were driven out in Henrietta’s phaeton everyday, seeing much of the pretty country. Of course we went to Sidbrook, & admired everything there .. Ibbit looking in great beauty, with the rest. Unfortunately we had to come away on the very day on which aunt Jane & uncle Hedley were expected from Brighton, so that our pleasure was not rounded off. I made many reflections there,—some delightful, others instructive—dont think me either impertinent or malignant when I say that some concerned your thoughts on the elevating nature of a life in the country as compared to metropolitan careers generally–
We left dear Mr Kenyon better than we found him,—& have had improved accounts since– We arrived here last tuesday week, & I am ground down between proof sheets & fogs– What’s twenty times worse, however, is, a new anxiety from a letter of Arabel’s yesterday in which she speaks of Papa’s being more unwell than usual– He is better but still I have cruel thoughts about it all, lying like stones on my heart. Since we came here we have had a glance at Alfred & his pretty wife: oh, so very pretty. He has gone to Madeira & she has followed him in another vessel, (they were not allowed to be together) & will return after .. from six weeks to four months .. when he is half promised that a consulship will be ready for him.
My own people come back from Ventnor, on the twenty-sixth of this month, & George comes before– I shall see him therefore, .. I think, not the others– Robert will go as soon as he can, .. & I shall not hang at his skirts to prevent it, for the sake of saying a second painful goodbye– We mean to come back next year. Meanwhile whether we go to Florence & Rome, or Algiers .. remains in doubt. Robert wants the Algerine climate for me, & is inclined to it on other grounds: I lean faithfully to my Italy–
Shall we see you?—are you coming? Nobody is in town, except a few pre-Raffaelites, & the like.
Our true love to both of you–
Your loving
Ba–
Let me tell you—George (having read some of the proof-sheets) swears that my poem is “worse than Don Juan,” “unfit for the reading of any girl!” So Arabel tells me– I want to give Mr Martin a motive for reading it–
Publication: Sydney Musgrove, “Unpublished Letters of Thomas de Quincey and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” Auckland University College Bulletin, 44 (1954), 25–27.
Manuscript: Auckland Public Library.
1. Date provided by EBB’s reference to having arrived in London from Taunton “last tuesday week”; that is, on 1 October, though in letter 3870 she tells Henrietta that the Brownings “were in Devonshire Place before eleven” on the night of September 30th.
2. James 1:12.
3. On 28 September. It was Mary Altham Cook’s fourth birthday.
4. The “sons of Anak,” or “Anakims,” were a semitic tribe of giants, as referred to in the Old Testament. See for example Numbers 13:33 and Joshua 11: 21–22.
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