4228. EBB to Anne Braun
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 25, 202–204.
2, Rue du Perrey, Le Hâvre,
Maison Versigny
August 10 [1858] [1]
My dearest Mdme Braun,—
If you have not heard from me before, it has not been that I have not thought of you anxiously and tenderly; but I had the idea that so many must be thinking of you and saying to you with sad faces “they were sorry,” that I kept away, not to be the one too many. It seems so vain when we sympathize with a suffering friend. And yet it is something—oh yes, I have felt that. But you knew I must feel for you, if I teazed you with words or not; and I, for my part, hearing of you from others, felt shy, as I say, till I heard you were better, of writing to you myself. And you are feeling better, Mrs. Jameson tells me, and are somewhat more cheerful about your state. I thank God for this good news. So glad I shall be if you should be able to get down to Brighton to breathe in from the fresh sea-air, the strength of life necessary to throwing off what remains of your malady. Is Dr. Fell [2] one of your advisers? If not, his great reputation would incline me much to take an opinion from him.
One of the few reasons for which I regret our absence from England this summer, is that I miss seeing you with my own eyes, and I should like much to see you and talk to you of things of interest to both of us. If illness suppresses in us a few sources of pleasure, it leaves the real ich [3] open to influences and keen-sighted to facts which are as surely natural as the fly’s wing, though we are apt to consider them vaguely as “supernatural.”
“More and more life is what we want” [4] Tennyson wrote long ago—and that is the right want: indifference to life is disease, and therefore not strength. But the life here is only half the apple—a cut out of the apple, I should say, merely meant to suggest the perfect round of fruit—and there is in the world now, I can testify to you, scientific proof that what we call death is a mere change of circumstances, a change of dress, a mere breaking of the outside shell and husk. This subject is so much the most interesting to me of all, that I cant help writing of it to you– Among all the ways of progress along which the minds of men are moving, this draws me most. There is much folly and fanaticism unfortunately, because foolish men and women do not cease to be foolish when they hit upon a truth—there was a man who hung bracelets upon plane-trees. [5] But it was a tree; it is a truth, .. notwithstanding; yes, and so much a truth, that in twenty years the probability is, you will have no more doubters of the immortality of souls, and no more need of Platos to prove it.
We have come here to dip me in warm sea-water in order to an improvement in strength, for I have been very weak and unwell of late, as perhaps Mrs. Jameson has told you. But the sea and the change have brought me up again as I hope they may yourself, and now I am looking forward to getting back to Italy for the winter—and perhaps to Rome.
Did you know Lady Elgin in Paris? She has been hopelessly, in the opinion of her physicians, affected by paralysis—but is now better, her daughter writes to me. [6] A most remarkable person Lady Elgin is. We left her sitting in her garden, not able to speak, .. to articulate one word .. but with one of the most radiant happy faces I ever saw in man or woman. I think I remember that you knew her. Her salon was one of the most agreeable in Paris, and she herself with her mixture of learning and simplicity one of the most interesting persons in it.
We were only a fortnight in Paris, and, except a few drives, I had little part or lot in the glory and gaiety of the place. Then we came down here after trying Étretat and failing. We are out of the town—there is not the shadow of a tree within reach of us—but there’s a beach close by and a very animated sea, crowded with ships and fishing-boats. Little Penini who is more an Italian than ever, (and you remember how you detected the Italian gesture and intonation in him?) yet enjoys his visit here, and is learning to swim, .. looking, in the midst of his long floating locks, like a small merman.
Dearest Madme Braun, I wont think of the possibility even of your writing to me,—so little do I expect to hear. Indeed I would not write if I considered it would entail writing upon you. Only believe that I tenderly regard and think of you, and always shall. May God bless you, my dear friend.
Your attached,
Elizabeth B. Browning.
Publication: LEBB, II, 288–290 (in part).
Source: Kenyon Typescript, British Library.
1. Year provided by the return address; 1858 was the only year the Brownings stayed in Le Havre.
2. Jesse Weldon Fell (1819–90), an American physician practicing in London. In A Treatise on Cancer, and Its Treatment (1857), Fell describes the topical application of a lotion consisting “of a root used by the North American Indians on the shores of Lake Superior. … It is a perennial plant … called by botanists the Sanguinaria Canadensis” (pp. 56–57). From 1856 to 1857, he treated Edmund Gosse’s mother, Emily, with this method without success. Soon after, his treatment was discredited by the British medical establishment (see Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, ed. Michael Newton, Oxford, 2004, p. 213).
3. “Self.”
4. Cf. Tennyson, “The Two Voices” (1842), line 399: “More life, and fuller, that I want.”
5. EBB alludes to Xerxes I, who, according to Herodotus, halted his army on the road to Sardis in Lydia when he “found a plane-tree, to which for its beauty he gave adornment of gold, and charged one of his immortals to guard it” (Herodotus, VII, 31, trans. A.D. Godley). RB included a more embellished version of this story in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), lines 1028–35, evidently drawing from an alternate source (see The Poems of Robert Browning, ed. John Woolford, Daniel Karlin, and Joseph Phelan, Harlow, 2012, p. 513n).
6. Lady Augusta Bruce, as indicated in the last paragraph of letter 4229.
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