5733. RB to Augustus De Morgan
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 69–70.
19 Warwick Crescent,
Upper Westbourne Terrace W.
March 26 ’66.
Dear Sir, [1]
Thank you very much for your kind letter and the trouble you have taken. I had already made great use of your Book of Almanacs [2] —and mentioned to Mr Gillespie my fancy that you might have an old Roman Almanac among your books. I shall easily get the information I want from a Breviary, as M. Libri [3] suggests: may I beg you to thank that gentleman for his obliging reference? as well as to believe me, Dear sir,
Yours gratefully
Robert Browning.
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Johns Hopkins University.
1. Augustus De Morgan (1806–71), mathematician and logician, professor of mathematics at the University of London (1836–66).
2. The Book of Almanacs … with Means of Finding the Day of any New or Full Moon from B.C. 2000 to A.D. 2000 (1851). Years later, in a letter to Leonard Henry Courtney, RB writes: “In order to be quite sure of the age of the moon on the occasion of Pompilia’s flight, I procured De Morgan’s register of lunar risings and settings for the last—I forget how many hundred years” (14 May 1881, ms at ABL). The “age of the moon” occurs in The Ring and the Book, VI, 1077–79, where Caponsacchi tells Pompilia: “Leave this house in the dark to-morrow night, / Just before daybreak:—there’s new moon this eve— / It sets, and then begins the solid black.”
3. Guglielmo Libri, Conte Carrucci del la Somaia (1803–69), mathematician and professor of physics at the University of Pisa (1823–30), fled to France as a political refugee in 1830, later becoming a French citizen.
___________________
