4566. William Allingham to EBB & RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 122–124.
Lane, Ballyshannon, Ireland,
January 3rd 1860
My dear Mr & Mrs Browning,
May you have a happy New Year & many such!
Your most kind & welcome letter [1] found me, not beside Atlantic waves but in Thames fogs, & just returned from 3 weeks’ holiday in North Germany, viâ Holland. I put off taking my leave from the Customs in hope of finding you in Paris, but hearing from Miss Browning that you were gone south instead of north, [2] I suddenly made up a mind, went to London & crossed to Rotterdam. In London I found Carlyle, just from Scotland, sitting on the rug by a hot fire (not in cold weather) with his back against the mantlepiece, attired in a rich dressinggown & smokingcap & puffing from a long meerschaum. ’Twas incredible how easternly pictorial he looked. Mrs Carlyle then came in, stronger & cheerfuller than when I saw her a twelvemonth before. She has always, by the by, been specially friendly to me. C., with face full of rustic brown colour & eyes more flaming than ever, looked very vigorous, but grumbled just as usual—among other things about “perplexities I don’t see my way out of, hardly,” in finishing off Frederick. [3] I got tea, & also a line from Carlyle, offered when he heard I was going to Weimar, to Hofrath Marshall, [4] a Scotchman long settled there & Private Sec. to the Grand Duchess. The great C. goes out to ride, or did then, every day at 2, and said that in case I could ride, & chose to appear there on horseback at that hour, … well & good; but the tempting offer lay out of my reach.
Almost the only other person I then found in London was Gabriel Rossetti, in his old bridge-end rooms, [5] fatter, going on much as usual. I wanted him with me, but he was held by a hundred cobwebs, & has stayed in town, I think, all the year round. His most notable work was a commenced oilpicture, perhaps 5 feet by 4 (but I am always out ridiculously in such guesses from memory) of Mary Magdalene—not rushing down steps as in the watercolour of some time ago, but quitting a festive procession to ascend the steps of a house, through an open window whereof is visible the head of Christ. A young man & woman, half lightly half in wonder, try to hold her back. Gabriel has finished a forcible pen & ink drawing of this, [6] which has been well photographed & will doubtless reach you in that form. Here I bethink me to ask whether it is a good plan to send things for you, such as a book, to Chapman & Hall’s? Last month a copy of this little volume of selected lyrics & short poems, [7] as to which you did me a good turn, was sent there addressed to you, for I know of no other way. You will hardly find anything new in it, but still you will perhaps like to see it. Many will think & I have already been told that it contains an unreasonable number of my own verses [8] —but for that—for the name of the book & of the editor—for 20 insertions & 200 omissions—&c &c &c– I have no defence, unless it be one to say that the volume is a trifle, among many such,—yet was honestly done, after its sort. I always felt it was an imprudent business to meddle with, & told the publisher I thought it would be right to do it, but pleasant to leave it undone: I may count all the unselected living Poets in the english language my mortal enemies from this time,—friends too ask why not have given the most striking specimens of each writer’s genius who does appear?– It is not a book of “specimens” at all.
Publication: None traced.
Source: Author’s draft [9] at R.H. Taylor Collection.
2. See SD2287 in vol. 26.
3. The History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great (6 vols., 1858–65).
5. 14 Chatham Place, Blackfriars Bridge, where Rossetti lived from 1852 to 1862.
6. Rossetti’s pen and ink drawing “Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee” is now at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England. The oil painting, commissioned by Thomas E. Plint, was apparently never finished. The watercolour that Allingham describes, “Mary Magdalene Leaving the House of Feasting,” was completed in 1857 and is now at the Tate Gallery, London.
7. Nightingale Valley (see letter 4259, note 17). It was issued by Bell and Daldy with an 1860 imprint.
8. Six of Allingham’s poems appear in Nightingale Valley, including “The Fairies” (pp. 42–43).
9. Allingham’s second draft. For the first, see letter 4546; for the finished letter, see letter 4593.
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