5299. Walter Savage Landor to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 317–318.
[Florence]
[ca. December 1863] [1]
Dear Browning, it gives me great pleasure to hear again from you after so long a silence. I may, then, hope to see you once more, altho the chances are against me living thro’ the winter. My lodgings I have not changed: Mrs Romagnoli has hers. The lamp went out every night before seven, and left such a stink as forced me to open both windows to avoid suffocation. It has taken away my voice and given me a cough instead. This will carry me off. —Your account of Robert is highly gratifying to me. Let me prognosticate that there will be a third great poet in the family. Our friend (let me claim a share of him) writes me the most obliging of letters. [2] Do not expect any great pleasure from my poems—the latin are the best of them– [3] Doctor Walker, who undertook to revise the press, left it to me, week after week, until I had a brain fever for 4 days and nights; and in my impatience I threw 732 letters and all my papers under the grate. Some of the letters were from the dearest friends of the last century. Alas! quo desiderio veteres renovamus amores atque olim [a]missas flemus amicitias. [4]
I must write no more—only to add how I value your friendship and how you overvalue my poetry–
Address, on integral page: Robert Browning / Esq.
Publication: BBIS-5, pp. 50–51.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Approximate dating based on Landor’s implication that RB might visit Florence (see SD2664) and Landor’s reference to Heroic Idyls, which was published on 14 November 1863, and to the “732” burned letters, which are also mentioned in letter 5258.
2. Probably, Edward Twisleton, who, after visiting Landor in the spring, became a steady correspondent (see R.H. Super, Walter Savage Landor: A Biography, New York, 1954, p. 499).
3. In Heroic Idyls, pp. 280–348 consist of Latin verse.
4. “With which we make our old loves live again, and weep for long-lost friendships” (Catullus, Poems, 96, 3–4, trans, F.W. Cornish, rev. G.P. Goold).
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