5716. RB to Edward Dowden
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 59.
19 Warwick Crescent,
Upper Westbourne Terrace, W.
March 5. ’66.
My dear Sir,
Pray forgive the delay in replying to your very kind letter: [1] I was much engaged at the time I got it, and wanted to look a little deeper into the matters you enquire about: but I keep you waiting far too long, so will try and answer off-hand,—premising that I have a facility at forgetting my own things once done, and that, in this case, I have put this particular poem away and behind me long ago—not at all meaning to undervalue it thereby, but because it is good husbandry of energy in an artist to forget what is behind and press onward to what is before. “Elys,” then, is merely the ideal subject, with such a name, of Eglamor’s poem—and referred to in the other places as his type of perfection, realized according to his faculty. (El lys—the Lily.)
You are quite right about the classification of Sordello’s—neither with the first nor the second of those moods of mind: it is the second as “enervated” and modified by the impulse to “thrust in time eternity’s concern”—that, or nothing: this is just indicated in the passage where these words occur [2] —and the rest of the poem is an example of the same.
I did mean to make it a companion to “Paracelsus,” and remember while employed on it, telling Leigh Hunt so. Let me say, that I heartily thank you for such sympathy and such expression of it. I hope you will like a long poem on which I am now at work. [3]
Pray remember me ever as
Yours most truly
Robert Browning.
Publication: LRB, pp. 91–92.
Manuscript: Berg Collection.
2. See Sordello, I, 554–565.
3. The Ring and the Book.
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