4099. Leigh Hunt to EBB & RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 218–220.
Hammersmith–
Nov. 17th [1857] [1]
My dear Friends,
Though I was extremely glad at the sight of your kind letter and have ever since been wondering how I could refrain from telling you so on the instant, yet being occupied with pressing correspondence at the time, I became delayed, partly by the hope of getting rid of some other urgent work, partly by the languor which always ensues with me on exertion, but chiefly by an old and in vain constantly punished habit which I have, of thinking I must needs write replies to letters which interest me very much, as long and as full of matter as the satisfaction which they give me. I am very sorry; particularly on an occasion like this: for when friends express regret for anything, I always feel as if such subjection to myself put me in the wrong with them, and as if I had nothing to do but to go down lower on my own knees, and express my greater regret for having subjected them to the subjection. At all events, you will see, that the delay of weeks on such an occasion becomes, in my mind, something quite as much needing pardon as that of months on the other; for if the idea of what it was incumbent on me to do in return for a letter of reasonable dimensions became the vast thing which I speak of, what must have been the case with yourselves, when the mere sight of such a huge epistle as mine must have visited you with a sense of a monster of responsibility at once! I do not, I assure you, (as after these confessions you may easily believe,—and I could give you more, if you needed them) at all wonder at your putting off the day of answering, especially considering the succession of circumstances you speak of, including the illness of your boy, the terribleness of whose beauty at such a time I can too well imagine; for though I have not seen it myself in such beauty physical, I have, several times, in beauty spiritual and leave-taking still more terrible to remember, for the leave-taking was well-founded– I dare not say more yet, except that I now feel to belong almost as much to the next world as to this. The common-places of this world often appear very strange to me, and the uncommon places of the next as if they must needs be things household and familiar, and the only explainers, & reconcilers to themselves, of that other imperfected wonder: as indeed, thank God, I believe they will be.
I forgot to say, dear Mrs Browning, at the beginning of my letter, that one of the accumulators of the causes of my delay was a theological temptation occasioned me by a passage in your own letter which you will readily call to mind, [2] but which I found it would be impossible for me to discuss, I should again have become so voluminous, and, I little doubt, so unsatisfactory. This you will as readily believe, when I tell you, that the only two books of paramount authority with me are the Book of Nature, and the heart of its reader, Man; and that the operations in the one, and the aspirations of the other,—(though I fully concede, as I am bound to do, all the reconcilements, and possibilities, and transcendentalisms of every kind, which greater understandings & imaginations than my own may see in other books) compel me,—if so glad a conclusion can be called compulsion,—to be of the opinion, that God is the unmingled, wholly benevolent, and conscious spirit of Good, working through his unconscious agent Nature and his imperfectly conscious agent, Man; that Evil, where it is evil, and not a necessary portion of Good (as it probably all is, ultimately) is the difficulty presented to the course of this working by the unconscious, involuntary, and therefore wholly unmalignant mystery called Matter; that God, though not immediately or in all the stages of his processes almighty, is ultimately so; and that his constant occupation is the working out of heavens in place and time, in which prospection and retrospection somehow or other become reconciled to the final, conscious beatitude of all the souls that have ever existed:—See! I have not been able to avoid my theology at last! As to “not letting you sit by me,” most pleased & honoured shall I feel myself if you will let me sit on any form of goodnatured allowance by you. Your husband, I think, would be equally charitable. I have not addressed you two separately in this letter, except as I might by turns, if sitting with you in a room; though I feel that you have separately addressed myself for very kind reasons on this special occasion. I have also left myself little more room in this sheet of paper, and I dare not take another for fear of again running out of bounds, & making my head giddy. But not the less, dear Robert Browning, do I thank you for all which you have said to me so warm-heartedly about yourself, about myself, about the divine Portuguese Sonnets, about Kenyon, about Shelley, about everything. So, of the precious words to me of your wife. God bless you both, and enable me to live to commune with you again in person, before I rejoin the dear ones with whom I trust we shall all be some day in company together.
Your obliged and affectionate Leigh Hunt.
Address: Robert Browning Esqr / Ferma in Posta, / Firenze, / Italia.
Publication: The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, ed. Thornton Hunt (London, 1862), II, 269–271.
Manuscript: Brown University.
1. Year provided by postmark.
2. See the penultimate paragraph in letter 4069.
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