559. Bryan Waller Procter to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 226–227.
4 Grays Inn Square
5 March 1837.
My dear Sir /
I ought to have thanked you for your very nice book [1] before—but I have had a sick family since I received it, & latterly I have been very busy & have from day to day delayed it—meaning to say all this & much more to you personally. But I must thank you at all events, & therefore (instead of postponing the thing further) I beg you to accept of this poor written acknowledgment.
Pray come & give me a call the first day that you walk this way, & tell me where a note will find you. Although I am in the ’midst of law papers & law books, I am so far master of the agreeables of life as to be able to give you a chop here, & a bottle of wine, & water (the true Castalian) [2] —to say nothing of the flow of Soul, [3] in the person of our illustrious contemporary, Forster, who I do not despair of prevailing upon to quit his throne in the clouds & mingle with us & give our repast an Attic character. What do you say to all this?
I hope that you are writing—& writing your best. The second work of an author is quite as important as the first, & I know (from sad experience) how impolitic it is to give little or no care to an author’s second publication. Were I at leisure now, I would try to do some thing worth reading—an effort that I have never yet made—& I must pay the penalty accordingly. Take warning, & prosper.
I am Dr Sir
Very truly yours
B W Procter.
Address, on integral page: To / Robt Browning Esqre / (Care of J. Forster Esqre / 58 Lincolns Inn Fields.).
Publication: Luther A. Brewer, My Leigh Hunt Library, the Holograph Letters (Iowa City, 1938), pp. 217–218.
Manuscript: University of Iowa.
1. Paracelsus. For details of RB’s friendship with Procter, see pp. 322–323.
2. The spring on Mt. Parnassus, the waters of which were supposed to impart poetical inspiration.
3. A reference to Pope’s “The Feast of Reason and the Flow of Soul” in The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated (1733), line 128.
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