Correspondence

3949.  Leigh Hunt to EBB & RB

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 175–187.

Hammersmith,

Dec. 31. [1856] [1]

Dear Robert Browning (for “Browning” seems too familiar to be warranted by my amount of intercourse and “Mr.” sounds too formal for it (albeit its very formality has justly procured it metrical acceptance with Mrs. Browning), therefore I hope that by addressing me as “Leigh Hunt” in return you will authorize the tertium quid to which I have recourse in my perplexity),—

I received the new edition of the poems and the new poem itself, [2] and read the latter through instantly, almost at one sitting; but I had work waiting for me at the time, was obliged to return to the work, had letters come upon me besides, and so could not write to give thanks, and say what I wished about the book as quickly as I desired. And what am I to say now? I dare not begin to think of uttering a fiftieth part of what I would say; for you must know that I can never write upon any subject beyond the briefest and least absorbing without speedily getting into a kind of fluster of interest and emotion, with heated cheeks and a tightening sense of the head; and, in proportion to this interest, this effect increases: so that I am forced in general to write by driblets, and the worst of it is I write even then a great deal too much, just as I fear I talk, and have to cut it all down to a size so inferior to the outbreak, that you would at once laugh and pity me if you saw the quantity of manuscript out of which my book, or even my article, has to be extricated. It was always so with me more or less, and now it is worse than ever. Age increases the written gabble. See it is upon me now! So I stop short.

New Year’s Day, 1857.

God bless you, dear people, you and your son, I mean, and such others as may be mixed up with your well-being; and may He keep to you the “Happy New Year” which more or less must surely have come to you all, whatever shadow may be in it for the loss of the admirable friend who has secured it to you. These are the first words I have written this year; and they must needs be a little solemn.

But here am I nearly at the close of my second page and have not yet said my little brain-sparing [3] say on ‘Aurora Leigh.’ I say, then, that it is a unique, wonderful, and immortal poem; astonishing for its combination of masculine power with feminine tenderness; for its novelty, its facility, its incessant abundance of thought, imagination, and expression; its being an exponent of its age and a prophetic teacher of it; its easy yet lofty triumph over every species of common-place; and its noble and sweet avowal, after all, of a participation of error, its lovely willingness to be no loftier, or less earthly, than something on an equality with love. I cannot express myself thoroughly as I would—I must leave that to the poet, worthy of the poetess, who sits at her side; my own poetry, of the inner sort, being of very rare occurrence (if it ever occur at all), and the rest of it never being moved to vindicate its pretensions to the title, except at foolish intervals by foolisher critics, who have no poetry in them of any kind, and who undertake to judge of things out of the pale of their perceptions. Therefore, you see, I beg to say that there is modesty at the bottom of all this apparent claim to the right of being loud and eulogistic on great works, and that I offer it for no more than it is worth—with homage to you both.

Nevertheless, I must not forget to add that the poem is a wonderful biographico-conversational poem. Wordsworth has written a biographical poem, [4] which I am ashamed to say I have not yet read; but between you and me, Robert Browning, growing bold again on the strength of my convictions, I dare affirm that Wordsworth, veritable poet as he is, is barren and prosaic by the side of the ever exuberant poetry of this book; and as to dialogue, out of the pale of the drama, and that only of the finest kinds, I know of none like it; for the wit and satire of dialogues in Pope and Churchill [5] are things of another and lower form, besides being nothing nigh so long; so that this poem is unique as a conversational poem, as well as being the production of the greatest poetess the world ever saw, with none but great poets to compare with her. How did she contrive it, the little black-eyed playful thing (for I can see plainly that she omits no proper quality in her universality), pretending to be no more than other women and wives, yet having such a great big creation of things all to herself?

Nor must I omit to thank her for so small a thing as a title—a great thing too, like a master’s note or two of prelude on an instrument; ‘Auròra Leigh,’—it sounds to me like the blowing of the air of a great golden dawn upon a lily; strength                sweetness (fill up that gap for me, please, for my cheeks are burning) [Thursday evening] [6] for the poor little word “Leigh” is a gentle word, too, and a soft—just the half of the word “lily” (lee-lee), and I thank her, in the names of all who are called by it, for the honour it has received at her hands. The late Lord Leigh, [7] a great lover of poetry, after whose father I was christened, would have been charmed by it, and so, I believe, will his son; [8] though where she got the notion of its being particularly stately and aristocratic I do not know, albeit “Stoneleigh Abbey” has a fine sound; and Stanley (Staneleigh), the same word provincialized, is an ancient great name, half made of it—Ley, Lee, Lea, Legh, and Leigh being all forms, you know, of the same word; meaning, some say, a meadow, others a common, others an uncultivated plain, and some, I believe, a green by the water’s side. As to me, having grown up in the name, and been used to be pitied as “poor Leigh” for my juvenile and indeed grown-up troubles too, besides being called by it, on so many other occasions, both private and public, I could not help being almost personally startled now and then by the piteousness of the above designation, by the remonstrative “Mister Leighs,” a “man like Leigh,” “Smith who talks Leigh’s subjects,” [9] &c. Having no other pretensions, however, wrong or right, to be a Leigh in the poem, never having thought that my fellow creatures were to be “rescued by half means without the inner life,” [10] much less having—— But to say no more about myself, thanks and thanks again for the whole book, and for the new poems in the other books, just resumers of the rights in the Portuguese sonnets, the appatriation of which (what is the proper word?) [11] I always grudged them, though it was a very natural refuge from the misapprehensions of the ignoble. With the other contents of those three precious volumes I shall make myself reacquainted and more intimate. Some of them remind me—as a word did also which you let fall here one day—that I once, I believe, said something in allusion to them about “morbidity.” I withdraw the term utterly, not because in apparently similar treatment of certain points of faith I should not believe it applicable to most persons, but because in our great English poetess I can recognize no excesses of sensibility incompatible with a mind and understanding healthily strong; or rather I cannot but recognize the health and strength notwithstanding them, and discern the unbigoted and all-reconciling conclusions of prospective and heavenly right-reason and justice in which they finally repose. Perhaps you know—and I sometimes think you do, from your great expressions of good-will towards me in the inscription in your books [12] (for we may love and reverence a man for his good intentions however much we may differ in kind or degree with his opinions)—that you have seen a book of mine called ‘The Religion of the Heart.’ [13]

I forget exactly what I was going to say here; but it is no matter. Very likely you will be able to supply from your own thoughts what was rising in mine.

[2 January]

I began the preceding page and a few lines before it on this present Friday morning.

You must not suppose I am in the habit of writing my letters in this manner, though I am apt to do so when they grow long and I have other things to write in the course of the day.

My only objections to Mrs. Browning’s poetry at any time—very seldom in her latest—chiefly, if I remember, in ‘Casa Guidi Windows’—are now and then a word too insignificant at the end of her blank verses (if, indeed, it does not add to the general look of strength by its carelessness and freedom), and a giving way to an excess of thought and imagery, amounting sometimes to an apparent irrelevancy into which she is tempted by her facility of rhyming as well as thinking, and which, as in Keats’s early poem ‘Endymion,’ [14]  forces a sense of the rhymes upon you for their own sakes, by very reason of the disrespect felt for their services, the air of indifference with which they are treated, and the arbitrary uses to which they are put. The same objection often applies to rhymes in Dante, whatever some critics may say to the contrary, and notwithstanding his own assertion (according to his sons) that a rhyme “never put him out.” [15] Very likely it did not, partly because he was a great poet and had images at will, and partly because he willed to think it didn’t. For his will was greater even than his great poetry; otherwise he never would have written that truly Infernal poem, or rather poems, of his (for his Heaven is often as Infernal as his Hell), in which he goes “dealing damnation round the land” [16] and cutting up his antagonists (often, very likely, better men than himself), and then calls his work sacro, [17] and tells us it made him—out of pure sense of its sacredness and grandeur, I suppose—macro, [18] chusing to forget the violence and bad passions he mixed up with it. I am aware that there are theories and philosophies, and excuses and charities, and a fine deep sense at bottom of them all, that can reconcile these and all other such perplexities by the way, and for some great and final good, and I pretend to gainsay none of them; nay, I go along with them all; but then the evil must be shared and shared alike, and Dante’s portion of it not blinked for the sake even of his genius; no, nor of his tenderness; which I admit and marvel at, as I do at his ferocity; wondering that he could have so much of the one without its producing misgivings about the other.

But I am terribly digressing.

Oh, there are one or two other objections which I had forgotten. One is that whatever may be said for the good which it might assist in furthering (for we “must not do evil,” you know, even “that good may come”), [19] and on the very same grounds that I should not like to see a woman fighting (though I allow that the illustration is an extreme one, and in the case of our poetess ludicrous—if it should not rather be termed irreverent, and not to be fancied), I do not like to find her advocating war. [20] Wars, I allow, must sometimes be fought, till men arrive at man’s estate, and nations must rise against oppression; but I would rather have the women among them saying to the warriors, “Come in here and be healed,” than “Go forth and kill.”

The other objection, or rather doubt, refers to a circumstance to which the critics have demurred, I believe, in the new poem (which mention of the critics reminds me, by the way, that I hoped I should myself have been the first person to notice the poem, and for that purpose, among others, proposed to a new periodical work, which has lately been set up under good promise, [21] to commence a series of articles in it under the title of ‘Notes of a Reader’; [22] but though the editors accepted another article from me, and expressed a wish that I should co-operate with them, they objected to these). The circumstance in question cannot have been objected to by any very high-minded or thoughtful reader, upon those ordinary grounds, the very refinements of which are coarse.

Such readers on the contrary might consider it, with the writer, the best that could be found, if not for the happier purposes of the story, yet for the very triumph and ascendency of the highest points of refinement and conscious worth over profoundest insult, the one excess being necessary to the proof of the other. But unfortunately such readers are very rare even in “the highest circles”; and so far the book may suffer drawback, though the poetry, and the human interest too, must surely in the long run carry all before it.

Some of my favourite passages (if you will not think I am making my opinion of too much importance) are the one at p. 2, beginning “Oh my father’s hand,” &c. (words which I never read without tears), down to “not overjoyous truly”; [24] “She stood straight and calm” (p. 10) down to “eat berries”; [25] “We get no good” (p. 26) down to “good from a book”; [26] “O delight” (p. 33) to “How those gods look!” [27] (I can conceive no poet that ever lived writing finer poetry than that); “Being observed” (p. 74) to “They might say something” [28] (horrible intensity of insipid forbiddingness!); the paragraph beginning “Day and night” [29] at p. 98; that at p. 101 beginning “A lady called upon me”; [30] Lady Waldemar’s “love” and the answer to it, pp. 105 and 6; [31] the dreadful passage at p. 122, “Father, mother, home,” [32] &c.; the hospital, [33] p. 128; “Dear Marian” (p. 139) to “backward on repose”; [34] “I should have thought” (p. 153) to “diamonds ...... almost”; [35] “Every age” (p. 187) to “apprehended near”; [36] “I answered slow” (215) to “everybody’s morals”; [37] the infant, [38] p. 250 and 51 (though here I recollect an objection which occurred to me, I don’t know whether physiologically just, though it seems as if it ought to be so—an ante-natal objection, as to whether such a heavenly perfection of little earth could or ought to be born of such a horror); “O crooked world” (p. 278) to “most devilish when respectable”; [39] “Carrington, be glad,” &c. (p. 303), down to “first similitude.” [40] Oh, but I’ve another objection, now I see it marked again, which is at p. 343, where the heroine says that being “more wise” means being “sadder.” [41] I am ashamed, it is true, to remind Mrs. Browning that wisdom is here confounded—is it not?—with knowledge, and that knowledge is not at all wisdom; for nobody must know it better than she; and Coleridge who knew it as well has yet said the same thing in his ‘Ancient Mariner.’ [42] Wisdom, you know, is the optimization of knowledge, the turning it to its best and therefore least sad account. But to conclude these favourites:—Page 378 brings me to “Her broad wild woodland eyes” down to “spoke out again”; [43] then the divine, self-reconciling, all reconciling confession of love beginning “But I love you, sir” (p. 390), and ending at “word or kiss” [44] (p. 394); then the “heart’s sweet scripture” (same page) to “lift a constant aspect”; [45] then, p. 398, “I flung closer to his breast,” [46] &c.; and lastly, the evangile (though I construe it, perhaps, not so much after the writer’s interpretation, or not quite literally so much, as after my own), beginning “The world’s old” (p. 402) and ending “He shall make all new.” [47]

A thousand thanks for them all and for almost every bit of all the rest; perhaps I should say every bit, if I understood it exactly as it was meant.

I do not know whether you have seen a book of mine called ‘The Religion of the Heart.’ I sometimes think you have, and that it is my good intentions in it to which you allude when you express “reverence” for anything in my nature. (I have said this before!) I also sometimes fear you have, or may, lest you should differ with it more than I could wish. But as you and your fellow worker touch so often on points common to such aspirations as the title of the book implies, it was chiefly on those points that I intended to ask you both to talk to me on that unfortunate night when age and infirmity lost me the conversation which I had most longed for since I lost Shelley.

I have been called off from my letter for these three days by the necessity of attending to my poor wife, who has had another attack of illness worse than the last. [48] The peril of it has now abated, and we begin again to cheer up; although these repeated attacks, at her time of life, and after so many years’ confinement to her room, are very alarming.

Being able again to think of something else, and returning to my letter, I find that my fright has delivered me from a worry that was haunting me; for you must know that I am apt to feel troubles, both warrantable and unwarrantable, with a sort of monomania; till the thought being broken into, for however short a time, I know that all will be right again; and the hope of this interruption, which long experience has given me, helps it to come, and thus always enables me to look for it, sooner or later, be it from nothing but some new trouble, which is pretty sure to be the case; at least, such it has been for a good many years past. I do not complain. I have had a great many enjoyments in the course of my life and a profusion of animal spirits; and I have often thought that had I not had an unusual portion of troubles, my lot as a fellow creature would have been unfair and far beyond my deserts. They have taken care, however, to see fair play, leaving me, I hope, upon the whole, a case for compensation in some other sphere. Did it ever strike you how frightful it would be (Hibernice) [49] to be wholly prosperous and happy? happy all your life? I think or fancy it would have made me look upon myself as a sort of outcast from the general lot and its claims—doomed to perish wholly and be put out, as a thing completed and done with,—never to know or enjoy anything further, never to see again faces that we have lost. The incompleteness argued against us all here is surely our claim hereafter,—incompleteness of joy, incompleteness of knowledge, incompleteness of nature. I think God means to round all these things in human want and aspiration, just as he rounds orbs or oranges. He does not incomplete anything else. Why should he leave us poor and anxious imperfections incomplete? The argument, thus put, appears to me, you must know, to complete the argument of compensation. This is what the angels see when they say “Sweet,” in the beautiful sonnet beginning,

Experience, like a pale musician, holds

A dulcimer of patience in his hand:— [50]

a lovely beginning, albeit I thought when I read it, “That’s what I do,” and so far I myself am like the musician thus musically graced.

But what if you should have no patience with patience in this long letter? I believe I am putting off the account of my “worry” for very shame of it; and yet I must tell it you, in order to vindicate myself from what may (possibly) have seemed an insensibility or unthankfulness on my part towards praise from Mr. Kenyon and his own merits besides. Probably neither he nor his friends thought anything of the matter, especially as I knew very little of him personally; having but once dined with him at his invitation, or perhaps Landor’s suggestion of it (who was with us) many years ago; and seen him but once, long afterwards, for a few minutes at Mr. Thackeray’s. But I knew well, and think I must have said what I thought of his ‘Rhymed Plea for Tolerance,’ [51] —surely did if I had any public journal in my editorship at the time, and you may imagine how a man of my opinions and my regard for the old heroic couplet must have liked it. But in 1849 he left his ‘Day of Tivoli’ [52] at my door, and in this ‘Day of Tivoli’ was a note, praising, to my extreme gratification, one of the very few passages of mine in verse which seemed to me to be allied to poetry of the inner sort; and I not only fear that I never wrote to thank him for this (doubtless, if so, out of my foolish habit of delaying to write anything till I could write much), but, as if from the very fact of his lying so close to me in thought and intention (a circumstance that has happened to me before), overlooked the opportunity of mentioning him as the almost solitary instance of a graceful and facile employer of the heroic couplet since it went out of fashion, and of asking students in versification, and poets who wrote in loftier strains, to try to write it as well, and see how difficult it was. You know how a poet so rare as Tennyson failed in it, in his verses on the Duke of Wellington. [53] This omission I can still take an opportunity of supplying, as far as itself goes, and shall; but when I saw the name of John Kenyon, &c., in the Times obituary, [54] I said to myself, “Ah, Kenyon is gone; and I can now never let him know how pleased I was, and how much I felt in common with his books.” [Here follows an erased passage.] [55]

I have been forced to leave off my letter again, and for thus long, partly by the poor sick room, and partly by the necessity of answering the letters of some friends and others. Excuse the above vile scoring out. [56] Owing to some preposterous yet most worrying misconceptions of me a few years ago, the supposed intender of which expressed to me his “deep sorrow” for having inadvertently given rise to them, I happen to be what I never dreamt of the necessity of becoming, one of the most jealous of men for the reputation of my personal delicacy in money matters; [57] and there are points sometimes on which such a man cannot go on talking of himself, even to those who would be incapable of misconceiving him. Suffice to add to what I have said of Mr. Kenyon, that when I saw his name a second time in the newspapers, I said to myself, “At all events, a man who could enjoy and indulge his tastes so much as he did in life, and who could bestow so much happiness when he died, may well have been able to dispense with a few words from me.”

Since writing the above I have read the article on ‘Aurora Leigh’ (my pen feels a pleasure in writing those two words) in Blackwood’s Magazine (my old enemy during the Tory wars, and subsequently regretful friend,—a common lot of mine, and one of the melancholy prides of my life). Like almost all Blackwood’s articles there is a certain amount of strength and acuteness in it; but the writer’s understanding is not of a measure to take the height of the poetess’s; [58] and after an attentive perusal I can remember no objection in it worth notice except that to Marian’s accomplished style of language, which a great nature, however, and thought-forcing sorrows might have tended to produce; though what these could not complete must be laid perhaps to a certain account common to the poetess’s great family ancestor Shakspeare (for she certainly is of his blood). His only departure, you know, from nature consists in his tendency to make his characters too indiscriminately talk as well as himself. As to the critic’s writing out her verse like prose, and then pretending it is not poetry [59] (a process formidable, I own, to too much of what is called poetry, and I have trembled to see it applied to myself, even under no disparaging announcement), he might as well have written out a symphony of Beethoven’s without the bars, and then pretended it was not music.

I must close—at last!—my long letter, for I have told Mrs. Jago, who offered to post it for me, that it would very certainly be ready to go off to-day (having twice told her nearly as much before), and I have added that as there is nothing in it which I could not have said in the presence of you and Mrs. Browning she might read it; if she would like to do so; which she says she would. I would fain show her what respect I can, and give her any little entertainment in my power; for she has been extremely kind to Mrs. Hunt, visiting her often, and giving her personal, and I may say even professional, help under the like kind advice of Mr. Jago, who, though he cannot go out, comes to us in spirit.

But I told her also, that I would leave her room enough to answer a letter which she has received from Mrs. Browning, and in which best remembrances, she tells me, are sent to me; for which hearty thanks. Don’t fancy that I am going to tax your corresponding faculties with another such epistolary pamphlet as this! I have been led into it by degrees and by particular circumstances, and I do not pretend to apologize for it; for besides taking some interest in it on its own account, I know how welcome letters of almost any kind from their native country are to people abroad. I shall write letters in future of reasonable dimensions, if you encourage me with a few words in answer to them, or in notice of them, and I do not in the least expect that you should take any greater notice of this, or wish that you should say anything of one superfluous point in it; and people like you will believe me when I add, that to take me at my word is the greatest compliment you can pay to your affectionate friend,

Leigh Hunt.

P.S. “More last words”! I find that I must deprive Mrs. Jago of another bit of her space; but the page is of a good size, and I hope she can write as small as myself, and so retain space enough. It is to say a word respecting the lock of Milton’s hair. [60] Mrs. Jago asked me the other day, very naturally, about its authenticalness; and this had made me consider that you and Mrs. Browning might as naturally, indeed still more so, as you were so good as to accept my rude bit of pull from it, be glad to be told what I told her. The evidence simply amounts to this; though I accepted it, as I think you will do, with a trusting as well as a willing faith. The lock was given me, together with those of Dr. Johnson and Swift, by the late Dr. Batty, [61] the physician, a man of excellent character, to whom I was to bequeath them back if he survived me, which he has not done. To Dr. Batty the three locks were given by Hoole, [62] the translator of Tasso, &c., and Hoole, though a bad translator, was a very honest man. And to Hoole they were given by Dr. Johnson himself, whose scrupulous veracity as to matters of fact is well known. I forget at this distance of time what Batty further said to me on the subject, for it was a long while ago, and I was in a confusion of pleasure at the moment; but my impression is that the locks of Milton and Swift were given to Johnson while he was writing the ‘Lives of the Poets,’ [63] and that Milton’s was one, or part of one, which had been at the back of a miniature of the poet belonging to Addison. Addison, you know, personally knew and took an interest in the welfare of Milton’s youngest surviving daughter, Deborah. [64] I do not find any mention of him among the possessors of portraits of Milton, and it does not seem likely that the miniature and the lock would become divorced. Yet I think you will agree with me that there is strong presumptive evidence in these three descents of the belief on the part of true and honourable men, one of whom asks me to bequeath the lock back to him in case I died first; nor do I myself feel the least doubt of the lock, short of positive certainty.

I have driven Mrs. Jago up into a corner indeed. I am afraid she must take refuge in a separate sheet.

Address: Robert Browning, Esq., / Ferma in Posta, / Firenze, / Italia.

Docket: Offered to my kind host, and dear friend now, in memory of the delightful week I was privileged to spend at the house of Professor Masson.—Robert Browning, Apr. 21, ’84. [65]

Text: The Athenæum, 7 July 1883, no. 2906, pp. 15–18.

1. Year provided by reference to Hunt’s internal date of “New Year’s Day, 1857.”

2. EBB’s Poems (1856) and Aurora Leigh (1857).

3. Sic, for brain’s–paring.

4. The Prelude (1850).

5. Charles Churchill (1732–64), poet who achieved instant fame in 1761 with the publication of The Rosciad, which “uses the Dryden/Pope device of a mock succession and, as extended in its eighth edition, is about the same length as Pope’s Dunciad” (ODNB).

6. The square brackets appear in the printed source. New Year’s Day in 1857 fell on a Thursday.

7. Chandos Leigh (1791–1850), 1st Baron Leigh (1839), poet and literary patron, was the son of James Henry Leigh (1765–1823), who had inherited the Leigh family seat at Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire.

8. Presumably, William Henry Leigh (1824–1905), 2nd Baron Leigh (1850), eldest son of Chandos Leigh.

9. Cf. Aurora Leigh, IX, 145.

10. Cf. Aurora Leigh, IX, 638–639.

11. The OED cites Hunt’s use of “appatriation” in this letter as the only example of it: “Assignment to a native country; attribution of natural origin.”

12. See letter 3836, note 1.

13. The Religion of the Heart. A Manual of Faith and Duty. (1853), a revision and expansion of his earlier Christianism: or, Belief and Unbelief Reconciled, Being Exercises and Meditations (privately printed, 1832). It contains Hunt’s ideas and advice on numerous spiritual and moral subjects, directed to readers who choose not to follow an organized religion.

14. Published in 1818, Keats’s narrative poem of over 4,000 lines is based on the mythological story of the mortal Endymion, loved by a goddess of the moon, Selene. It opens with the well-known line: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”

15. We have been unable to trace such a remark in the commentaries written by Dante Alighieri’s sons: Jacopo (d. 1348) and Pietro (d. 1364). However, L’Ottimo Commento (1333), often attributed to Andrea Lancia (fl. 1314–51), contains the following comment on Inferno, X, 85: “I, the writer, have heard Dante declare that he was never led by rhyme to say other than what he intended, but that he often caused his words to signify different senses to those in which they were used by other poets” (Charles Tomlinson, The Literary History of The Divine Comedy. Introductory Lecture, 1879, p. 10).

16. Cf. Pope, “The Universal Prayer” (1738), line 27.

17. “Sacred.”

18. “Thin,” or “emaciated.” See Paradiso, XXV, 1–3.

19. Cf. Romans 3:8.

20. War or fighting is urged or sanctioned many times in Casa Guidi Windows (1851); for example, when the speaker of the poem advises Mazzini: “Trust and distrust fewer; / And so bind strong and keep unstained the cause / Which, at God’s signal, war-trumps newly blown / Shall yet annuntiate to the world’s applause” (II, 573–576).

21. Hunt refers to The National Magazine, founded and edited by John Saunders (1811–95) and John Westland Marston (1819–90), first issued in November 1856. The article that “the editors accepted” from Hunt was “Christmas Day Divided Between Two Worlds; or, Fragment of a Day-Dream of the First Heaven,” which appeared in the January 1857 issue (pp. 195–197).

22. We have been unable to trace publication of such a series.

23. The square brackets appear in the printed source.

24. Cf. Aurora Leigh, I, 25–47.

25. Aurora Leigh, I, 272–309 (pp. 10–12). Page numbers in notes, here and below, correspond to the first London edition.

26. Aurora Leigh, I, 702–709.

27. Aurora Leigh, I, 901–927 (pp. 33–34).

28. Aurora Leigh, II, 866–886 (pp. 74–75).

29. Aurora Leigh, III, 271–295 (pp. 98–99).

30. Aurora Leigh, III, 344–363 (pp. 101–102).

31. Aurora Leigh, III, 437–484 (pp. 104–106).

32. Aurora Leigh, III, 936–946 (pp. 122–123).

33. Aurora Leigh, III, 1106–35 (pp. 128–129).

34. Aurora Leigh, IV, 109–167 (pp. 139–141).

35. Aurora Leigh, IV, 513–535 (pp. 153–154).

36. Aurora Leigh, V, 165–183.

37. Aurora Leigh, V, 952–983 (pp. 215–216).

38. Aurora Leigh, VI, 566–598 (pp. 249–250).

39. Aurora Leigh, VII, 92–105 (pp. 278–279).

40. Cf. Aurora Leigh, VII, 794–826 (pp. 303–304).

41. Cf. Aurora Leigh, VIII, 534–535: “I’m perforce more wise, / And that, in truth, means sadder.”

42. Cf. the closing lines of Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798): “A sadder and wiser man / He rose the morrow morn.”

43. Aurora Leigh, IX, 274–301 (pp. 378–379).

44. Aurora Leigh, IX, 612–724.

45. Aurora Leigh, IX, 731–760 (pp. 394–395).

46. Aurora Leigh, IX, 833–842.

47. Aurora Leigh, IX, 941–949.

48. In a letter dated 2 December 1856, Hunt told his friend Charles Ollier: “Mrs. Hunt and myself have both suffered more than commonly, she with cough as well as rheumatism” (The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, ed. Thornton Hunt, 1862, II, 206).

49. “In the Irish fashion”; that is to say, paradoxically or seemingly illogically.

50. EBB, “Perplexed Music” (1844), lines 1–2. The sonnet ends: “But angels, leaning from the golden seat, / Are not so minded! their fine ear hath won / The issue of completed cadences; / And, smiling down the stars, the whisper—Sweet.”

51. Kenyon’s poem of this name was published in 1833. We have been unable to trace a review of it by Hunt.

52. Kenyon, A Day at Tivoli: With Other Verses (1849).

53. Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852), Tennyson’s first publication as poet laureate, contains heroic couplets, but its overall rhyme scheme is much more varied. The poem’s poor reception led Tennyson to revise it.

54. We have been unable to trace an obituary of Kenyon in The Times. Presumably, Hunt refers to a reprint of The Athenæum item (see letter 3931, note 10) that appeared in The Times of 22 December 1856 (p. 7).

55. The square brackets and phrase appear in the printed source.

56. At the end of the previous paragraph.

57. Possibly as a result of Dickens’s depiction of the impecunious and irresponsible Harold Skimpole in Bleak House (1853), widely believed to be a portrait of Leigh Hunt.

58. A review of Aurora Leigh appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for January 1857 (pp. 23–41). Although the reviewer, William Edmonstoune Aytoun, conceded that EBB is “endowed with a powerful intellect,” he considered the story of the poem to be “fantastic, unnatural, exaggerated; and all the worse, because it professes to be a tale of our own times. No one who understands of how much value probability is to a tale, can … peruse the poem, without a painful feeling that Mrs. Browning has been perpetrating, in essentials, an extravaganza or caricature, instead of giving to the public a real lifelike picture” (p. 32). For the full text of this review, see pp. 336–347.

59. Aytoun formatted as prose several passages from Aurora Leigh. Following such a presentation of V, 813–832, he wrote: “Is that poetry? Assuredly not. Is it prose? If so, it is as poor and faulty a specimen as ever was presented to our notice” (p. 35).

60. See letter 3836, note 3.

61. Robert Batty (1762–1849), obstetric physician and amateur artist.

62. John Hoole (1727–1803). “In 1763 he published Jerusalem Delivered (a translation of Gerusalemme liberata), having had the first book printed in 1761 for his friends. His labours on Tasso’s works (Rinaldo was published in 1792) earned him the nickname Tasso Hoole. … Sir Walter Scott … said the translator was ‘a noble transmuter of gold into lead’” (ODNB).

63. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (1779–81).

64. Deborah Clarke (née Milton, 1652–1727), the youngest of four children of John Milton (1608–74) and his first wife, Mary (1625–52). An anecdote regarding Mrs. Clarke and Joseph Addison (1672–1719) is told in Robert Shiells (pseud. Mr. Cibber), The Lives of the Poets (5 vols., 1753). Not long before his death, Addison, a great admirer of Milton, learned that Mrs. Clarke was alive and invited her to his house, asking that “if she had any papers of her father’s, she would bring them with her, as an evidence of her being Milton’s daughter; but immediately on her being introduced to him, he said, Madam, you need no other voucher; your face is a sufficient testimonial whose daughter you are; and he made her a handsome present of a purse of guineas, with a promise of procuring for her an annual provision for life; but he dying soon after, she lost the benefit of his generous design” (II, 141–142).

65. The address and docket are from Rosaline Masson, Poets, Patriots, and Lovers: Sketches and Memories of Famous People (1933), p. 40.

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