4635. William Michael Rossetti to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 247–248.
45 Upper Albany St., London, N.W.
27 March. [1860] [1]
My dear Mrs Browning,
Allow me to thank you very warmly for the copy of “Poems before Congress” which was sent to me the other day as “from the Author.” [2] There has surely been a great work done for Italy; &, without being myself one of them, I sympathize with those who believe that the doer of the work has been of a truth actuated by great & glorious motives. I wholly respect also & sympathize with the courage which insists upon asserting this belief in the teeth of a public opinion as blatant & intolerant as that at home here; &, even had one not so strong motives for honouring the little book, the genius of it must transfigure questioning into reverence, or exasperate dissent into rancour. It appears to me to contain some of your very noblest writing & thought—perhaps more than any other work, in proportion to its bulk. I must gratify myself by instancing from my own particular admiration Napoleon 3 in Italy, The Dance, A Court Lady, & A Curse for a Nation.
I am a little ashamed of mentioning “Sordello” now, as I happened, in writing to Mr Browning some time ago, to name a notion of mine of writing a detailed exposition of it, [3] which to my shame I have never done. But perhaps he might be pleased, or at least amused, to hear the following, which produced the same effect on me. A friend of mine [4] (himself frantically “Sordellivorous,” as he phrases it) tells me that Profr Grote, [5] of Cambridge (a brother, I understand, of the historian) has set himself & another person to “write out a prose version of some of the most knotty passages, in order to see how the two interpretations look side by side.” In order also to master Sordello in its “total perfection,” the Profr means, “at the earliest opportunity, to give an entire week to its serious perusal,” having already arrived at the conviction, to use his own words, that, “on the score of difficulty Sordello is much to be preferred to the Agamemnon of Æschylus.”
Please to excuse this gossiping interrruption of perhaps some serious occupation, & to remember me with affectionate respect to Mr Browning.
Very truly your’s,
W. M. Rossetti
Mrs Browning.
Address: Mrs Browning / Casa Guidi / Florence. Redirected: Roma.
Publication: Selected Letters of William Michael Rossetti, ed. Roger W. Peattie (University Park, Penn., 1990), p. 109.
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Year provided by Rossetti’s references to Poems Before Congress, which was issued on 12 March 1860.
2. We have been unable to trace the whereabouts of this presentation copy.
3. Rossetti’s letter has not surfaced. For RB’s reply to it, see letter 4302.
4. As indicated in SD2356, the friend was John Lucas Tupper (d. 1879), sculptor, poet, critic, and an early member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. He was a son of George Frederick Tupper (1791–1873) and his wife, Eliza (née Isaacs).
5. John Grote (1813–66), Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge from 1855 until his death. His eldest brother, George Grote (1794–1871), was the author of History of Greece (8 vols., 1846–56).
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