Correspondence

5436.  RB to Moncure Daniel Conway

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 103–104.

[Paris]

[?5] [August 1864] [1]

<***> If I, who cannot restore your child, would, He who can, will <***>

Text: M.D. Conway, Autobiography: Memoirs and Experiences (Boston, 1904), II, 12 (in part).

1. The Conway’s son, Emerson, died of measles on 4 August 1864 and was buried on the 6th. Conway quotes this fragment, in a slightly altered form, in “Recollections of Robert Browning” and explains that the letter containing it was received “when I came from the fresh grave” (The Nation, 9 January 1890, p. 28).

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