4652. RB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 287–288.
Rome, Via del Tritone 28.
Apr. 19. ’60.
Dearest Isa, we have just got your very interesting letter—thank you indeed for telling us so pleasantly all about your great Florence sights. [1] We received your six newspapers (& no more)—and I hope you also received the proof of the rascality of that fellow of the “Monitore” [2] —Ba sent it last Saturday. With this you get the “Scomunica” [3] and my photograph.
I wish we had been at Florence,—tho’ if the weather at all resembles the cold, rainy, wretched time we are groaning under, Ba would have needed to fortify Casa Guidi with charcoal-pans and other illuminations of the wrong sort, and enjoyed the doings no more than at Rome. How could the Apthorps give it all up so strangely? We have not seen them yet—but know they were delighted with their visit & your hospitality,—over & above the enjoyment of Miss Cobbe.
You were a dear goose to care three oat-grains for the “Saturday Review”—which goes to work honestly enough, and calls the “Curse” by its right name,—so why should Ba care, who finds herself just as directly attacked by every political article that it prints? [4] Same of Blackwood,—except that he is too great an ass: [5] we should like to be the weekly & monthly annoyance of these fellows to the world’s end. Chorley’s cat-scratch was offensive from the creature’s spitting at the same time. I hoped it was all bile and suppression of “Roccabella” [6] and that he really could not see out of his poor winking eyes—but he now refuses to print Ba’s short, quiet letter, [7] or to mention that there was an introduction to that part which he wanted to pass off for the whole, or to do anything beyond making such an acknowledgment as he would be obliged to offer had Ba, in sheer fright at his dreadful promise of cutting off her head, stammered out some Chorleian excuse without a word of truth in it, shoving the thing on America by a cunning afterthought: the latter offence exceeds the former by so much as a piece of deliberate meanness exceeds a spirit of mere angry cat-nature, [8] —and Ba, who did not care one cat-whisker for the first (tho’ I did) feels really aggrieved now, because nobody reading the “Ath:” without help of the book itself will be able to understand the true state of the case. As long as there’s no lying, let us have as much Saturday Reviewing as you like: they’re our natural enemies, and I rather enjoy the practise of “knagging” myself—don’t I, Isa? Kiss & be friends, “my own one” [9] —as the poet says, and how does he go on saying? Why, most appropriately—“Now you are young, and when you are older—Now you’re coy, and when you’re grown bolder,—Now you’re a maid—and when you’re my wife—Till the end of this year—and the close of my life—I ever will love thee!” Fact! Good bye & God bless you! Love to Miss Field—kind regards to Miss Cobbe—Ba’s Baism to everybody.
Ever yours affectionately,
Robert Browning.
Publication: B-IB, pp. 331–332.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Concerning the entrance of Victor Emmanuel II into Florence (see letter 4648, note 6).
2. The receipt for the Monitore Toscano payment (see letter 4647).
3. “Excommunication” (see letter 4637, note 12).
6. A reference to EBB’s criticism of Chorley’s novel in letter 4524.
9. Alfred Domett (1811–87), “Song” in Poems (1833), lines 1 and 25. Each stanza of the poem ends with the refrain: “I love thee,—and will love thee again!” The continuation is taken, slightly misquoted, from the second stanza of an anonymous poem (signed “Gamma”) entitled “To Caroline—A Lover’s Oath,” which appeared in The Literary Gazette of 9 November 1822, p. 714 (see Joseph Phelan, “‘Now You Are Young’,” The Journal of Browning Studies, 1, February 2010, 87). See also Ashby Bland Crowder, “Attribution and Misattribution: New Poems by Robert Browning?,” Philological Quarterly, 91 (Summer 2012), 455–461, in which a case is made for RB as the author.
___________________
