4806. RB to Isa Blagden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 28, 266.
[Rome]
[7 January 1861] [1]
You dear Isa, are not you glad to see Ba’s hand again? & to be assured that she is getting better? though very slowly: she is so thin and so weak—but this perfect weather will brace her and repair everything, I trust.
Never mind the letter, any more than I did hearing that somebody else received one from the same writer complaining that “Florence was made a Hell to him thro’ the literary swine there”—why swine? why, to be sure, for the rhyme to “Apennine”—& he has thought better of it all & mended his ways, & is, no doubt, at Church for evening service this very moment—while I, alas,—“woe’s me, for I in Meshek dwell!” [2] There’s a pretty little poem, by the way, in the Atlantic Monthly, that seems fresh from the same mint—really pretty. [3] Write, & be good & you are ever dear. Most unjust, however, to dear old Landor––so I shall give Miss Field a certain gem I have. [4] God bless you,
RB.
Publication: B-IB, p. 384.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. This letter accompanied letter 4805.
2. Cf. Psalm 120:5.
3. Probably a reference to “Pampenea,” a poem narrated by a New Englander who lies on a beach dreaming of Italy. It appeared unsigned in the January 1861 issue of The Atlantic Monthly (pp. 72–74) but was in fact by Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907), an American writer and editor. He published it again that year as the title work in Pampinea, and Other Poems (New York, 1861). We have been unable to identify the writer of the letters that RB mentions. Aldrich made his first trip to Europe in 1875.
4. Perhaps a Landor manuscript.
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