4583. EBB to Kate Field
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 151.
[Rome]
[26 January 1860] [1]
My dear Kate,
I cant put a seal on your lips when I know them to be so brave at speaking truth. Take out your license then to name us as you please—only remembering, dear, that even kind words are not always best spoken– [2]
Then is there anything to say about your friends—except that they are your friends, which they will always be glad to have said & believed? I had a letter from America the other day, from somebody at hearing I was in bad health, desired to tell me that she should’nt weep for me when I was dead but for Mr Browning & Penini—!!!
No—dont repeat that. It was kindly meant.
And you are better my dear Kate, [3] & happier—& we are all thanking God for Italy– Love us here a little, & believe that we think of you.
Your ever affecte
EBB.
Address, on integral page: Miss Field.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Boston Public Library.
1. Dated by reference to letter 4582, at the end of which EBB tells Isa Blagden: “I am so tired I can only scratch a word for Kate.”
2. Miss Field had recently begun contributing letters to the Boston Evening Transcript and the New Orleans Daily Picayune (see letter 4484, note 11). Evidently, she had asked if she could mention the Brownings in her letters.
3. Miss Field had been suffering from a “bronchial infection in the fall of ’59 that threatened to damage her voice permanently. Between October and December, she later wrote, ‘I did nothing except lie on a sofa and be miserable’” (Gary Scharnhorst, Kate Field: The Many Lives of a Nineteenth-Century American Journalist, Syracuse, New York, 2008, p. 20).
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