471. EBB to Lady Margaret Cocks
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 68–72.
Rafarel House. Sidmouth.
Decr 31st 1832.
My dear Lady Margaret,
I hope you have thought my letter quite as long in coming, as I thought yours: tho’ it is rather vain in me to hope any thing of the kind. And it is rather ungrateful too, to begin my letter by saying so, instead of thanking you for the pleasure which you gave me when you did write. I believe my idleness may be traced up to some of the causes which produced your silence—that is, to a mixture of occupation & procrastination. I sometimes suspect that I should do a great deal if I were not apt to mean to do a great deal more; and I should amuse you did I not tire you (perhaps the more probable catastrophe) if I were to give you an account of all the laborious dreams which I dream in the course of my loungings on Mr Rafarel’s old red sofa. [1] But you will prefer hearing of such dreams as go thro’ the horn gate. [2]
Thank you, if I did not do so before, for your kind & interesting letter. I should very much like to read Abercrombie, [3] & intend to manage it, some day or other. Yet before I speak of him, I must say how glad I was dear Lady Margaret, to hear of your being well. Do always mention every thing about yourself; as you will only do me justice in believing how sincerely that subject interests me. We are all well here. Our dear Papa was obliged to leave us just before Christmas, to arrange about his West India supplies; and we are desired not to expect him for one week more. It is hard to do this: for expectation is one half of human happiness, & we lose a great deal of the last in losing him. When he is here, he walks out with us, & sits in the room with us nearly all day,—and he is far more to be missed now than when he was always in the fields instead of in our company. But he could not help going; and as there is now no cause for the very very long absences, we ought to bear the short ones patiently. We are in the same house to which we came in August. It is taken until the spring. What will then become of us I do not know, and I believe Papa does not know either,—but I certainly shall not prompt him to leave Sidmouth then—supposing, you know, that my promptings were of the least consequence in the world. There is no place which I particularly wish to go to; and this place is pretty & quiet, and I am very contented in it. As to society about which you enquire, there certainly may be residents here whom I might like extremely, but nobody whom I know at present has any sympathy, any Ciceronian sympathy, with my velle & nolle. [4] Indeed we do not know much of anybody, altho’ many families have called upon us, & we have the full privelege [sic] of bowing to a quarter of the people whom we meet– The Miss Massingberds, the daughters of a clergyman from Lincolnshire, often walk out with Henrietta & Arabel, and are very pleasing natural girls. Did you ever hear of Count Krasinski? He called upon Papa, & pleased him by conversation full of information, & interest. Sidmouth has been his residence for nearly a twelvemonth; and the Emperor of Russia’s offer of golden chains, does not tempt him to shorten his period of exile. Mrs Baynes is one of the Sidmouth people whom I like best. She is very pious, and is of course, branded as an enthusiast. [5] Would that more among us bore the mark of that brand!——
I am sure you will be glad, dear Lady Margaret, for my sake, when I add to the list of persons whom I see here, the name of my dear friend Mr Boyd. He found that something in the air or soil of Bath did not agree with him; and came off here at almost a day’s notice, to take me by surprise, & leave his house, which he had taken for a year, to his landlord. Mrs Boyd after settling him here, returned to Bath to arrange everything—but I am afraid she is not very well pleased with the transfer from Bath gaieties. Mr Boyd likes this place where he has been only one fortnight, and seems quite satisfied in being able to walk in the fields & to have me to read to him, as he used to do. His house is at a very short distance from ours; and my pleasures are much increased by his occupying it. I do not remember having ever been more astonished than when a note from the York Hotel announced his arrival at six in the evening—for I had just had a letter from Bath, without a word on the subject.
I am very much better than indeed I thought it probable that I should be, at least so soon. There is scarcely a ruin of my cough left—deja fuit: [6] and the weakness is diminishing & has diminished so fast that my likeness to Hercules will in time be quite complete. For dear Papa’s sake as well as for my own, I should be very grateful for this mercy. I walk now every day instead of riding—and am no longer a tyro [7] in as in presenti se– [8] Either to divert your attention from an abominable pun, or à propos to the donkey, I must tell you that when Papa left us, he actually had in his pocket a mss of mine to do something with it—“what it was, yet he knew not.” [9] Not my poem—so do not praise me for industry,—but my translation of the Prometheus with a preface & notes. I am afraid you will not praise me for impudence. I mention it to you, because I am writing, & am apt to write whatever is in my head; but I am very certain that the papers will come back to me as they went: because among other good reasons, I have lately seen a translation of the same play by Mr Medwin, reviewed favorably in, I do not, at this moment, remember what magazine. If Valpy wd have published mine in his classical library, I should have been glad; but Valpy will not publish single plays of the Greek dramatic writers—and after Medwin’s publication nobody else will. [10] Talking of the Greek dramatic writers, reminds me of envying your German. I must learn German some day before I have attained to the age of man—or at least to the fourscore years. I have had my hands & head full of a book called the Greek Theatre, composed in part of extracts, & edited by a Cambridge Student. It is an admirable work; but what I am going to speak of, is this. In the body of the work, are extracts from Schlegel: so full of poetical & classical enthusiasm, that I should like to know something of the German Schlegel!—— [11] Thank you for enquiring after my pupils in Greek. They are going on like the times—very badly, when I am in a bad humour, & very well, when I am in a good one. Do you understand that?– I am not fatigable in Hebrew,—and in about another month, shall have finished the whole Bible. But no one can understand thoroughly the Hebrew bible, without knowing the oriental languages. What shall I do? say ancora impar<are? [12] Or> shall I sit down & bemoan myself?–
This is the most egotistical letter that ever was written. Make your next one as like it as you can in that respect, my dear Lady Margaret. To Miss Commeline & Miss Baker & Mrs Watson, and all who are still kind enough to think of us sometimes, will you give our kindest remembrances. Our thoughts can never cease to revert to the neighbourhood we have left!—— What you say of Mr & Mrs Heywood, gave me pleasure: I have taken a liberty in enclosing a note to the poor woman who used to live at our gate. [13] Would you allow it to go into Ledbury some day when you send there?– I hope the uneasiness respecting Vincentia Money [14] is at an end, by this time. Will you say whether it is or not; & forgive the voluminousness of my enquiries & observations? The weather here has been as unlike Christmas as possible—very warm indeed—and I have found it scarcely necessary, when I walked out, to involvere me [15] in any thing more substantial than meâ virtute. [16] This remark will make you fix our thermometer at 90.
May God bless you dear Lady Margaret!– His blessing—His peace, given not as the world giveth, [17] is our sun in the night of sorrow—: and in His light we shall see light, [18] when the sorrow is past. What abundant mercies I have received from Him, He knows even better than I! But I know enough to be very sure, that for them in whose happiness I am interested, I ought to be anxious to secure nothing but His peace. May it always be yours.
Your affectionate & obliged
E B Barrett.
Henrietta’s kind regards to you. Our best compts to Lord Somers.
Address, on integral page: The Lady Margaret Cocks.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: James Hervey-Bathurst.
1. Mr. Rafarel was the owner of the house the Barretts were leasing. A contemporary guide-book described it as “a large brick house, well fitted up … and calculated for the reception of a nobleman or extensive establishment.”
2. In Greek mythology, the abode of the god of sleep had two gates, one of horn and one of ivory, through which dreams came forth; those passing through the gate of horn came true.
3. John Abercrombie (1780–1844). Perhaps Lady Margaret had recommended his Inquiries Concerning the Intellectual Powers or the Investigation of Truth (1830).
4. “Willing and unwilling.”
5. Mrs. Baynes was the wife of General Edward Baynes, of Woolbrook Glen, Sidmouth. Contemporary guide-books show her to have been much involved in community affairs, active in the Ladies’ Benevolent Society and in the management of the Infant School.
6. “Already fled.”
7. Underscored three times.
8. This is one of the more obscure of EBB’s puns. Despite suggestions from several Latin scholars, we have been unable to arrive at a clear understanding of her meaning. EBB’s phrase may owe something to her study of Latin. One of the most popular Latin Grammars of the day (William Lily’s, 1782) used the sentence “As in præsenti perfectum format in avi,” meaning that first conjugation verbs having the second person present indicative ending in “as” formed the perfect tense with the suffix “avi.” “As” was also a small copper coin, roughly equivalent to a farthing, and EBB obviously intended a pun on this and “ass” (i.e., the donkey she had been riding). In her construction, “se” is assumed to be an old form of “sine.” The consensus of opinion, therefore, is that EBB’s joke referred to the present absence of both donkey and money.
9. Cf. II Samuel, 18:29.
10. Valpy did publish Prometheus Bound on 11 May 1833.
11. August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845), poet, scholar and critic. The book EBB speaks of is The Theatre of the Greeks, first published in 1825 by Philip Wentworth Buckham, but her reference is to the second edition (1827) edited by James Tate, which included a substantial part of Schlegel’s critiques on Greek dramatists from his Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (1807–08).
12. “Learn again.”
13. i.e., Mrs. Barker.
14. Vincentia Sybilla, youngest daughter of Kyrle Ernle and Mary Thomasina Money.
15. “Wrap myself.”
16. “My virtue.”
17. Cf. John, 14:27.
18. Cf. Psalms, 36:9.
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