5685. Ernest de Bunsen to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 39–40.
Abbey Lodge
Hanover Gate
Regents Park
January 4/1866
Dear Sir
Since I had the pleasure of meeting you, I have been prevented from calling upon you, & even today I can only present myself at your house during the afternoon, when, as you told me, you are generally out.
I therefore write these lines to thank you for the highly poetical, &, I think, historically accurate views which you have laid down chiefly in the poems entitled ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’ & ‘A death in the desert.[’]
I should like to know whether, as I think you did, you refer in the former poem to an historical person, at all events to a successor of Ezra, [1] the recorder of the great reformation which was accomplished during the Babylonian Captivity. [2] I read it so, & therefore noted the following Verse.
Fool! All that is, at all,
Lasts ever, past recall;
Earth changes, but thy soul & God stand sure:
What entered into Thee,
That was, is & shall be:
Time’s wheel runs back or stops; Potter
& clay endure. [3]
Thus the introduction is given to what may be termed an excavation: the death of John in the desert. No matter where that ‘desert’ lay. In one sense all Apostles & Prophets of all ages have ‘in the wilderness’ prepared the way of the Lord. [4] ‘[‘]How will it be, when none more saith—‘I saw’?’[’] [5] Touching & tone presentiment of the darkness which followed when Rome became a second levitic Jerusalem! ‘Speaking as the case asked, & men believed,’ [6] only thus much could be doled out of the ‘mysteries’ which were so long hidden from the people, even in their elementary form, by those rulers who had ‘taken away the Key of Knowledge.’ [7]
But where am I to stop, if I would refer to all the beauty your lines reveal & partly conceal! Even a Poet must now-a-days mould his thoughts according to the exigencies & capabilities of the time. Much is written between the lines!
I shall consider it an honour if you will accept a copy of a work I lately published on ‘the hidden Wisdom of Christ & the key of knowledge’, [8] & which I have requested my publishers to forward to your address.
Possibly you may have time some day, to look at some of its many pages. An interesting review appeared on December 1 in the Revue des Deux Mondes. [9]
I am Dear Sir
Yours sincerely
Ernest de Bunsen. [10]
R Browning Esq.
PS. January 5.
I open my letter, which a bad cold prevented me from leaving at your house, to add, that I hope to call on you some morning.
Address: Robert Browning Esq. / 19 Warwick Crescent / Upper Westbourne Terrace.
Publication: BBIS-8, pp. 35–36.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. Bunson refers to the biblical Ezra, 5th-century B.C. author of Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah. The title character of RB’s poem is based on Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra (1092–1167), Jewish scholar born in Toledo, Spain.
2. The reformation in Israel that Ezra effected upon his return from Babylon to Jerusalem, which is recounted in Ezra 10.
3. Cf. “Rabbi Ben Ezra” (Dramatis Personae, 1864), lines 157–162.
4. Cf. Matthew 3:3.
5. Cf. “A Death in the Desert” (Dramatis Personae, 1864), line 133.
6. Cf. “A Death in the Desert,” line 138.
7. Luke 11:52.
8. The Hidden Wisdom of Christ and the Key of Knowledge: or History of the Apocrypha (2 vols., 1865), published by Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green.
9. The Hidden Wisdom of Christ was reviewed by Émile Burnouf in the issue of 1 December 1865, pp. 712–737, under the title “Un Essai d’histoire religieuse.—Les Origines du Christianisme d’apres M. Ernest de Bunsen.”
10. Ernest Christian Ludwig de Bunsen (1819–1903), Prussian biblical scholar, who about 1850 settled in London with his English wife. He is listed in RB’s address book of this period (AB-5) at Abbey Lodge, Regent’s Park.
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