4850. EBB to Harriet Beecher Stowe
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 18–21.
Rome, 126 Via Felice,
14 March, 1861.
My dear Mrs. Stowe,—let me say one word first. Your letter, [1] which would have given me pleasure if I had been in the midst of pleasures, came to me when little beside could have pleased. Dear friend, let me say it, I had had a great blow and loss in England, and you wrote things in that letter which seemed meant for me, meant to do me good, and which did me good,—the first good any letter or any talk did me; and it struck me as strange, as more than a coincidence, that your first word since we parted in Rome last spring should come to me in Rome, and bear so directly on an experience which you did not know of. I thank you very much.
The earnest stanzas [2] I sent to England for one who wanted them even more than I. I don’t know how people can keep up their prejudices against spiritualism with tears in their eyes,—how they are not, at least, thrown on the “wish that it might be true,” [3] and the investigation of the phenomena, by that abrupt shutting in their faces of the door of death, which shuts them out from the sight of their beloved. My tendency is to beat up against it like a crying child. Not that this emotional impulse is the best for turning the key and obtaining safe conclusions,—no. I did not write before because I always do shrink from touching my own griefs, one feels at first so sore that nothing but stillness is borne. It is only after, when one is better, that one can express one’s self at all. This is so with me, at least, though perhaps it ought not to be so with a poet.
If you saw my “De Profundis” you must understand that it was written nearly twenty years ago, and referred to what went before. [4] Mr. [sic, for Mrs.] Howard’s affliction made me think of the ms. (in reference to a sermon of Dr. Beecher’s in the “Independent”), [5] and I pulled it out of a secret place and sent it to America, not thinking that the publication would fall in so nearly with a new grief of mine as to lead to misconceptions. In fact the poem would have been an exaggeration in that case, and unsuitable in other respects.
It refers to the greatest affliction of my life,—the only time when I felt despair,—written a year after or more. Forgive all these reticences. My husband calls me “peculiar” in some things,—peculiarly lâche, [6] perhaps. I can’t articulate some names, or speak of certain afflictions;—no, not to him,—not after all these years! It’s a sort of dumbness of the soul. Blessed are those who can speak, I say. But don’t you see from this how I must want “spiritualism” above most persons?
Now let me be ashamed of this egotism, together with the rest of the weakness obtruded on you here, when I should rather have congratulated you, my dear friend, on the great crisis you are passing through in America. If the North is found noble enough to stand fast on the moral question, whatever the loss or diminution of territory, God and just men will see you greater and more glorious as a nation.
I had much anxiety for you after the Seward and Adams speeches, [7] but the danger seems averted by that fine madness [8] of the South which seems judicial. The tariff movement [9] we should regret deeply (and do, some of us), only I am told it was wanted in order to persuade those who were less accessible to moral argument. It’s eking out the holy water with ditch water. If the Devil flees before it, even so, let us be content. How you must feel, you who have done so much to set this accursed slavery in the glare of the world, convicting it of hideousness! They should raise a statue to you in America and elsewhere.
Meanwhile I am reading you in the “Independent,” sent to me by Mr. Tilton, with the greatest interest. Your new novel opens beautifully. [10]
Do write to me and tell me of yourself and the subjects which interest us both. It seems to me that our Roman affairs may linger a little (while the Papacy bleeds slowly to death in its finances) on account of this violent clerical opposition in France. Otherwise we were prepared for the fall of the house any morning. Prince Napoleon’s speech represents, with whatever slight discrepancy, the inner mind of the emperor. [11] It occupied seventeen columns of the “Moniteur” and was magnificent. [12] Victor Emmanuel wrote to thank him for it in the name of Italy, and even the English papers praised it as “a masterly exposition of the policy of France.” [13] It is settled that we shall wait for Venice. It will not be for long. Hungary is only waiting, and even in the ashes of Poland there are flickering sparks. Is it the beginning of the restitution of all things?
Here in Rome there are fewer English than usual, and more empty houses. There is a new story every morning, and nobody to cut off the head of the Scheherazade. Yesterday the Pope was going to Venice directly, and, the day before, fixed the hour for Victor Emmanuel’s coming, and the day before that brought a letter from Cavour to Antonelli about sweeping the streets clean for the feet of the king. The poor Romans live on these stories, while the Holy Father and king of Naples meet holding one another’s hands, and cannot speak for sobs. The little queen, [14] however, is a heroine in her way and from her point of view, and when she drives about in a common fiacre, looking very pretty under her only crown left of golden hair, one must feel sorry that she was not born and married nearer to holy ground. My husband prays you to remember him, and I ask your daughters [15] to remember both of us. Our boy rides his pony and studies under his abbé, and keeps a pair of red cheeks, thank God.
I ought to send you more about the society in Rome, but I have lived much alone this winter, and have little to tell you. Dr. Manning and Mr. De Vere [16] stay away, not bearing, perhaps, to see the Pope in his agony.
Your ever affectionate friend,
Elizabeth B. Browning.
Text: Charles Edward Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (London, 1889), pp. 356–359.
2. Mrs. Stowe’s stanzas, later revised and entitled “The Other World,” were enclosed in letter 4782. EBB sent a copy of them to Arabella, who in turn forwarded them to Surtees Cook (see letter 4807, note 2).
3. Blaise Pascal (1623–62), Pensées, II, 46.
6. “Cowardly.”
7. As reported in The Morning Post of 19 February 1861, on 31 January, William Henry Seward (1801–72), U.S. Senator from New York and soon to be Secretary of State in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, delivered in the Senate a speech that called for negotiation and compromise to solve the problems between the North and South. The same day, Charles Francis Adams (1807–86), U.S. Representative from Massachusetts and, from 20 March 1861, U.S. Minister to Great Britain, “did something of the same kind in the House of Representatives,” where he expressed himself ready “to amend the constitution as to prevent the free States from interfering to effect the abolition of local slavery” (p. 5).
8. Cf. Michael Drayton (1563–1631), “To my most dearely-loved Friend, Henery Reynolds Esquire, of Poets and Poesie” (1627), line 109.
9. EBB refers to the Morrill Tariff, which was passed by the U.S. Senate the previous month and signed into law by outgoing president James Buchanan on 2 March 1861. The tariff provided protection for certain industries in the North, while hurting the South’s ability to import foreign goods, especially those from England.
10. The Pearl of Orr’s Island; see letter 4831, note 16.
11. In his speech to the French Senate on 1 March 1861, Prince Napoleon “railed against the misdeeds of papal sovereignty which he claimed had become the greatest obstacle to Italian unity. France, he declared, need have no fear of a united Italy, which would be her natural ally, but the new Italy must have Rome as her capital. He ended by calling on the pope to withdraw to the Vatican and the right bank of the Tiber, leaving the rest of the city to the Italian government” (Edgar Holt, Plon-Plon: The Life of Prince Napoleon, 1973, p. 172).
12. Extracts from the proceedings of the French Senate, including Prince Napoleon’s speech, appeared in the 2 March 1861 issue of Galignani’s Messenger. A more detailed account was carried in Le Moniteur universel of the same date (pp. 274–277), filling more than eighteen columns.
13. See The Daily News of 5 March 1861 (p. 4).
14. The Queen of Naples, Maria Sophia Amelia (1841–1925).
15. Harriet (“Hattie”) Beecher Stowe (1836–1907) and Eliza Tyler Stowe (1836–1912), twin sisters who had travelled to Italy with their mother.
16. Aubrey Thomas De Vere (1814–1902), who had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1851.
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