4239. RB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 25, 225–226.
Le Hâvre,
Sept. 11. ’58.
Dearest Isa, I am sure you are grieved by the poor little dog’s death, [1] and that concerns me,—I hope you understand. The end of all these pets is distressing, & one feels relieved when the worst is over: you must only think, now,—as you are so justly entitled to think,—how you kept his life as full of happiness as it could hold. I dare say, I was unjust to his intelligence & never took trouble enough to observe it: but his good, innocent ways I did observe, and I fear you will miss them sadly. [2]
Our time here draws to a close—the place has been wholly “unfructuous” to me, unless Ba’s & Peni’s health turn out to be particularly the better for it: I wish we had gone to Trouville, [3] —really a desireable place, it seems: still, after my old imbecile way, I feel a sort of twitch at my heart when I think we shall go away “next Monday week”—i.e. the 20—Look out for us early in October. You have sent us the pleasantest of letters. What is all this about going to Madrid, or London? [4] I don’t understand,—which is no great marvel. Let us all be very gracious to each other when we meet again—“love” each other, we always did, I know, however portentous were the tokens of it. God bless you, dearest Isa.
RB.
Publication: B-IB, p. 166.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Frolic.
2. In his Italian notebook (entry for 27 June [1858]), Nathaniel Hawthorne remarks on RB’s “playful abuse of a little King Charles’s spaniel, named Frolic, Miss Blagden’s lapdog, whose venerable age (he is eleven years old) ought to have pleaded in his behalf” (SD2181).
3. See letter 4206, note 2. As EBB indicates in letter 4240, the Brownings had recently made an excursion to Trouville.
4. Isa Blagden visited Madrid from November 1858 to March 1859.
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