5476. RB to Julia Wedgwood
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 164–165.
[London]
Friday Mg [4 November 1864] [1]
Nor next Sunday, I suppose, by wearing away of the week, and no new word to me.
Yes, that was a strange, heavy crown,—that wreath of Sonnets,—put on me one morning unawares, three years after it had been twined, [2] —all this delay, because I happened early to say something against putting one’s loves into verse: then again, I said something else on the other side, one evening at Lucca,—and next morning she said hesitatingly “Do you know I once wrote some poems about you?”—and then—“There they are, if you care to see them,”—and there was the little Book I have here—with the last Sonnet dated two days before our marriage. How I see the gesture, & hear the tones,—and, for the matter of that, see the window at which I was standing, with the tall mimosa in front, and little church-court to the right. Afterward, the publishing them was through me,—in the interest of the poet, I chose that they should be added to the other works, not minding the undue glory to me, if the fact should become transparent: there was a trial at covering it a little by leaving out one sonnet [3] which had plainly a connexion with the former works: but it was put in afterwards when people chose to pull down the mask which, in old days, people used to respect at a masquerade. But I never cared. “The Portuguese”—purposely an ambiguous title—was that Caterina who left Camoens the riband from her hair. [4]
Come, we will,—that is, I will—be good now & henceforth, as children & the Italians say, and Houghton shall be in the right ten times over: and as for the review,—so infinitely viler a one has come out since [5] as to divert my attention from it effectually,—the writer beginning his performance by apprising us that we find “the imaginative faculty” in this man & that, and—“here and there a little of it in … Coleridge”! Then he goes on to laud me,—and him, you will peradventure allow me to kick—“morally,” as Leigh Hunt’s son used to describe his father’s exploits that way.
Oh yes—that dinner, and your ministration of ice! Do you know, I was rather resolute against—not pain, but the stupidity which accompanies it: but I knew you were all kind; and did not want to cut a figure colloquially. I shall not go out so much this next time, if it can be helped—feeling headachy already.
Goodbye, dear friend—
R Browning.
Publication: RB-JW, pp. 114–115.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. This letter is a reply to letter 5472.
2. At Bagni di Lucca in the summer of 1849.
3. Sonnet xlii, the opening line of which, “My future will not copy fair my past,” is the first line of “Past and Future” (1844).
4. As told in EBB’s “Caterina to Camoens” (1843), stanza XVI.
5. A review of Dramatis Personæ by Thomas Caulfield Irwin (1823–92), Irish poet, that appeared in the November 1864 issue of The Dublin University Magazine (pp. 573–579). Irwin is much more positive about RB’s work than William Stigand in The Edinburgh Review. However, Irwin, like Stigand, rummages around in some of RB’s earlier works, particularly Sordello. For the full text of this review, see pp. 354–358.
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