4340. RB to Robert Bulwer Lytton

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 26, 67–68.

Rome,

Feb. 28. ’59

My dear Lytton,

I congratulate you sincerely on your Book: [1] you have grown stronger & lost nothing in picturesqueness or music: the modern feeling in it is very true & valuable, and I see less & less the need to run up, with your own flowers, any other man’s stick. The old poems which I praised read still more praiseworthy,—while some others which you sent me subsequently and which seemed not altogether so good, are advantageously replaced by new ones of remarkable vigour, subtlety, and clear succinctness of expression. I know, I get up from a reading of all this with renewed assurance that you have an admirable faculty—no extension of the successes of which will surprise one.

I also know—(let me say in right of the true interest I have always taken in you) that so much of yourself as is manifested in the book not only justifies the feeling of—what seems now almost old days—but relieves it of much solicitude on some points. You will do justice to your great gifts of head and heart, and turn them into a pure beneficence to every body: to me, personally, they have been singularly so—and I look back with diminished regret to the old days I speak of, in the confidence that you will endear yourself for the future to no one less than to

Yours affectionately

Robert Browning.

Publication: None traced.

Manuscript: Lord Cobbold.

1. The Wanderer, published on 22 January 1859.

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