4314. EBB to Sophia Eckley
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 26, 17–18.
[Rome]
[?7] [January 1859] [1]
First of all, dearest dear Sophie mine, you are to come tonight, remember,—because I am not unwell. An[n]unziata romances. It is true I was not very well in the morning & had to be cured by that ‘mixture’ of yours. The wrong was the wrong of the cold weather, which always disorganizes me more or less.
As to Mrs Howe [2] … if you could but know how little I have thought of it, & how, when I do consider the subject, the strongest feeling I am conscious of, is a pity for her, & that she should have felt vexed through me.
As to the verses, there is nothing in them which has displeased me ever so little, except just the allusion to the “nameless drug” .. which is called a “nameless drug,” dear, & not morphine. People in general would scarcely understand what is meant—could not, I think, but for the gossip concerning that phrase of Dr Trotman [3] .. for which I am not angry with him neither, no, not a bit. Also, the imputation is perfectly true, so far, .. that life is necessary to writing, & that I should not be alive except by help of my morphine.
Altogether I am glad to know of these verses: it was right I should know: but, for the rest, I came to the conclusion, directly I had read them, to take no notice of their having been written. The bad taste .. & some bad feeling in the allusion to the drug .. are obvious enough,—but since they are the result of personal vexation, let us be sorry for the person who suffers. Who is not I, [4] do understand, darling Sophie. Ah dear, I have had too many poisoned arrows in me to care for a poor harmless word like this. I am not like you, Sophie .. used to walk on velvet & breathe only the breath of such roses .. as you send me, dearest kindest friend. How beautiful!
Love me & make me amends for things a thousand times worse than the book!——says
your Ba
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Berg Collection.
1. Conjectural date based on EBB’s reference to Julia Ward Howe’s “verses,” which RB discusses in letter 4316.
2. Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), social activist and poet, had sent a copy of Passion-Flowers (Boston, 1854) to the Brownings, whose lukewarm reception of it was reported to her. Her next volume, Words for the Hour (Boston, 1857), included two poems addressed to the poets: “A Word with the Brownings” and “One Word More with E.B.B.” The first begins:
I am told you do not praise me, Barrett Browning, high-inspired,
Nor you, Robert, full of manhood, with your Angel interlyred.
(p. 139)
The second contains an allusion to EBB’s use of morphine:
There are who thread unmeasured heights
With spirits for their body-guard,
Who vex with ill-directed flight,
And sentence, mystical, and hard.
I shrink before the nameless draught
That helps to such unearthly things,
And if a drug could lift so high,
I would not trust its treacherous wings.
(p. 146)
Mrs. Howe later regretted these poems. In a diary entry of 5 April 1867, she recorded that she had met RB at a lunch in London: “He sat next me at table and by and by spoke very kindly of my foolish verses about himself and E.B.B. I mean he spoke of them with magnanimity. Of course my present self would not publish, nor I hope write, anything of the kind, but I launched the arrow in the easy petulance of those days, more occupied with its force and polish than with its direction” (Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliott, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910, Boston, 1915, I, 266).
3. Thomas William Trotman (1809–62), English physician and accoucheur in Florence. We have been unable to trace his “phrase.”
4. Underscored twice.
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