5170. Walter Savage Landor to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 196–198.
[Florence]
January 30 [1863] [1]
Dear Browning, Of the four letters I have recieved this morning, not one has given me so-much pleasure as yours. Flattery shakes the highest and wisest—but I am certain that your flattery has moved me less than your friendship. Robert’s little billet is already placed in my treasury. Perhaps it is best that he is educated in England. Yet there is danger that, in a public school, he may lose much of his italian and music. Latin and greek are but poor compensations for them. Greek hung loose about me for many years, and has now dropt off. A little of the Odyssea, less of the Iliad, buzzes now and then in my ear, and I catch myself repeating the speech of Sarpedon, [2] and that harmonious and pathetic one of Anticleia. [3] At present I read nothing but novels; old chiefly and principally and with most delight Washington Irving’s– I have always felt more delight in reading what once delighted me than anything new. What would I give for the courage to read Clarissa [4] once more! I began to read it early in the morning of May the 14 1793. It spoilt my breakfast, made me send away my dinner, and deluged me with tea. With two intermissions, of less than ten minutes each, I continued to read, sleepless, during forty hours.
At Oxford I had been lectured in Justin. [5] He mentions the Phocæans, founders of Massilia. [6] It appeared to me a rare subject for a poem. I tried it instantly, but threw it aside for Gebir, [7] which I began the same summer. In the next I fell in love with Rose Aylmer; [8] she was not quite insensible to me. Lady Aylmer, her mother, sent her to Calcutta, to marry a young judge her cousin. [9] When you receive my next poems, which I hope will be in four or five weeks, you will find in them a reference to this event. [10] Four of the eight lines which I wrote on her death, are engraven on her monument. [11]
This very hour I receive the sad intelligence of Mrs Paynter’s death. [12] She was halfsister of Rose, and I often walked with them on the Burrows [13] at Swansea. Their brothers the two Lords Aylmer went first. [14] I have now five friends left—yet there are before me seven kind letters on my birthday.– [15] You will find enclosed a very worthless remembrance [16] of your grateful old-friend
Landor–
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Eton College Library, Michael Meredith Collection.
1. Year provided by Landor’s reference to Mrs. Paynter’s death (see note 12 below).
2. In The Iliad, V, 471–492 (see letter 4638, note 4).
3. In The Odyssey, XI, 180–203, trans. A.T. Murray, rev. George E. Dimock. In Book XI, Odysseus descends to the underworld, where he meets his mother, Anticleia, who tells him that she died of grief, “longing for you, and for your counsels, glorious Odysseus, and for your gentle-heartedness, that robbed me of honey-sweet life.”
4. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, the History of a Young Lady (8 vols., 1747–48).
5. Marcus Junianus Justinus, historian, whose only known work is “an epitome in Latin of Pompeius Trogus’ Historiae Philippicae, probably [made] in the third century A.D.” (The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 1957, p. 473).
6. Former name of Marseille, founded in 600 B.C. by the Phocaeans (Ionian Greeks). Landor may be confusing Phocaeans with Phocians, a people of central Greece, whose defeat by Philip, King of Macedon, is told in Book 8 of Justin’s epitome.
7. Gebir (1798), an epic poem in seven books.
8. Rose Whitworth Aylmer (1779–1800), only daughter of Henry Aylmer (1749–85), 4th Baron Aylmer, and his wife, Catherine (née Whitworth, formerly Cade, 1751–1805).
9. Unidentified.
10. In the poem “Abertawy” (Heroic Idyls, 1863, pp. 157–158), Landor closes with these lines:
Where is she now? Call’d far away,
By one she dared not disobey,
To those proud halls, for youth unfit,
Where princes stand and judges sit.
Where Ganges rolls his widest wave
She dropped her blossom in the grave;
Her noble name she never changed,
Nor was her nobler heart, estranged.
11. Landor’s poem on Rose Aylmer’s death was first published in 1806. It originally did not include the name “Rose.” The final version, entitled “Rose Aylmer,” reads:
Ah, what avails the sceptered race,
Ah, what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and of sighs
I consecrate to thee.
12. Sophia Catherine Paynter (née Price, 1788–1863), Rose Alymer’s half-sister, died at her home in Bath on 7 January.
13. According to the OED, “burrow” is “the form taken in some parts of Engl., esp. Cornwall … of which the more general representative is Barrow”; that is, “a heap or mound; in earlier use a hillock.”
14. Matthew Whitworth-Aylmer (1775–1850), 5th Baron Aylmer, Governor-General of British North America (1832–35), and Frederick Whitworth William Aylmer (1777–1858), 6th Baron Aylmer, Admiral R.N.
15. His 88th.
16. Unidentified.
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