4593. William Allingham to EBB & RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 160–162.
Lane, Ballyshannon, Ireland
Feb 1/ 60
My dear Mr & Mrs Browning
Your most kind & welcome letter found me, not beside Atlantic waves but in Thames fogs, just returned from 3 weeks’ holiday in North Germany, by way of Holland. I put off taking leave in hopes of finding you in Paris, but hearing you were gone south, suddenly made up a mind (in October) went to London & crossed to Rotterdam, then visited The Hague, Amsterdam, Utrecht, Hanover, Brunswick, ugly Berlin, Potsdam, Wittenberg, Dresden, Leipzig, Weimar, Eisenach & the Wartburg, [1] Homburg, Frankfort, & so down the Rhine back to Rotterd—— (as Hood’s religious servantmaid wrote it). [2]
Can it be at all worth while, after 3 months, to tell you whom I saw in London? very few indeed—but Carlyle for one, just from Scotland, sitting on the hearthrug by a hot fire with back against the mantlepiece, in a rich dressing gown & smoking cap, smoking,—face rustic brown, eyes flaming—vigorous altogether, but still refusing comfort as usual, grumbling about Frederick the Great &c &c[.]
Mrs Carlyle was much better than when I saw her a year before—in fact as well as ever I saw her, apparently. He gave an introduction to Hofrath Marshall in Weimar, a Scotchman there who is somehow Private Secretary to the Grand Duchess, [3] & who proved very kind, gave me two whole days, & got me into Goethe’s house (then strictly closed against the public) where all stands, down to the medicine-phial in his little bedroom. From the bookshelves I took down Carlyle’s ‘German Romance’ [4] & found in it a paper in C’s hand describing his house in Dumfriesshire—but moreover, the volumes themselves were uncut.. In his writing room—low, with wooden desks round the walls—two small windows on the garden—I noticed an odd little contrivance to help him “in judging of works of art” (an amanuensis of his showed us the place), namely a little pasteboard pyramid, this size, Illus. each side a different colour, with the words, in German, Reason, Understanding, Fantasy, Sensuousness, one on each. Somehow I recollect this particularly, & also the fact that I tried on an old hat of Goethe’s, & found it swallowed me up, who, have an extra-sized head.
Now that I have written the words, Mrs Browning’s objection to hear St Mark’s spoken of in connection with an old-fashioned chest of drawers (‘ormolic cabinet’ it was) occurs. She will say I have a talent for minimizing. Yet am I one of the greatest worshippers of names & places & shrines.
How many of those whom we know in perhaps the surest way—by their books—have gone away from us in ’59. Leigh Hunt [5] was the one I was most attached to personally: & he did his work too, though less tangibly than some: amidst all the flashing of Cornhill Magazines & Saturday Reviews one misses the little pot of poetic honey.
About De Quincy [6] one had a sort of grand vague idea, but reading him was too much like walking down into the fog which lay below you in semblance of a city. But methinks the world is poorer for the going of each & every one of them—Hallam, Macaul[a]y, Washington Irving, Leigh Hunt, De Quincy, Prescott: [7] first & oftenest however (saving the Times’s favour) we’ll remember the Poet—any Poet—even a blurred one! [8]
How has Mrs Browning passed this winter? Distance has some immunities. I escaped hearing of your sickness last year till I heard also of the recovery. Can Penini at all recollect me?
And the ‘Aurora leigh’ with its Portrait,—book & picture & handwriting are a frequent delight to me. [9] You have come well, & better than well, out of the engraver scrape.
The Rossettis I saw—all well– Gabriel going on as usual, & moreover beginning an oilpicture of Mary Magdalene. Holman Hunt has his ‘Christ in the Temple’ done at last, after several years. Millais draws pretty often for a woodcut weekly called ‘Once a Week’, cleverly, but adding nothing to the world. Tom Taylor had moved to a beautiful house at Clapham Common. [10] He had as usual four dramas a-playing, [11] 3 a-rehearsing, 5 a-writing, & a dozen or two more in other stages of development. But the Taylors have, besides, a splendid little boy about a year old, [12] whom I had the honour to see sprawling starknaked on a tiger skin.
Bell & Daldy sent to Chapman & Hall’s for you (is that the right course?) the little volume of selected poetry about which you did me a good turn. [13] It was probably a foolish thing to do—too much of my own in it (as I have already learned) [14] & 50 unselected Poets my enemies—however [’]tis not worth defence or apology. Only remember, it is not a book of specimins [sic], & its plan often shut out the most striking things.
I will send off, & today, this scrambling letter, [15] not to let the year get still older before saying God bless you in this & every year—and so goodbye (et me ama). [16]
W Allingham
Will you not write me a line soon?
Publication: Letters from William Allingham, ed. Helen P. Allingham (London, [?1913]), 8–9.
Manuscript: R.H. Taylor Collection.
1. Wartburg Castle, dating from the twelfth century, is situated on a hilltop overlooking the city of Eisenach in Thuringia, Germany. It served as a place of refuge for Martin Luther from 1521 to 1522.
2. We have been unable to trace this reference in the works of Thomas Hood (1799–1845).
4. German Romance: Specimens of Its Chief Authors; with Biographical and Critical Notices (4 vols., Edinburgh and London, 1827).
5. Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) died at the home of a friend in Putney on 28 August. “The cause of his death ‘was simply exhaustion’” (ODNB).
6. Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) died in Edinburgh on 8 December.
7. William Hickling Prescott (1796–1859), American historian who specialized in Spanish history, died in Boston on 28 January. Henry Hallam (1777–1859), historian, died on 21 January at “Pickhurst Manor, near Bromley, Kent, the home of his daughter Julia” (ODNB). Washington Irving (1783–1859), died on 28 November at Sunnyside, his house on the Hudson River in Tarrytown, New York. For Macaulay’s death, see letter 4586, note 2.
8. The words “any Poet” are blurred in the manuscript.
10. Lavender Sweep, Wandsworth, located in a crescent along the top of Lavender Hill, just a few yards from Clapham Common.
11. Tom Taylor (1817–80) saw three of his plays open in London during the autumn of 1859: Garibaldi, on 17 October at Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre; The Fool’s Revenge, 18 October at Sadler’s Wells; and Late Lamented on 19 November at the Haymarket. Additionally, two of his plays that had opened in the summer of 1859, The Contested Election in June and Payable on Demand in July, were performed in London that autumn.
12. John Wycliffe Taylor (1859–1925), only son of Tom Taylor and his wife, Laura (née Barker, d. 1906, aged 86), was born on 24 April at Battersea.
13. Nightingale Valley (1860); see letter 4259, note 17.
15. For Allingham’s earlier drafts of this letter, see letters 4546 and 4566.
16. “And love me.”
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