566. Mary Russell Mitford to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 243–245.
Three Mile Cross,
May 4, 1837.
A thousand thanks, my dear friend, for your kind inquiries after Dash. He is quite well again, better and younger than he has been for months, or even years. Yesterday he ran at least twenty miles, having accompanied my father and myself in a flowering expedition to Penge Wood [1] for the delicate wood-sorrel and other wood flowers, and to the Kennett Meadows [2] for the white and speckled fritillary and other meadow blossoms. By-the-way, is it not an extraordinary thing that the blackthorn (sloe blossom) is just coming into bloom in the hedges and the fritillary is in bloom in the meadows; the one being a blossom (as you well know) of March, early March; the other seldom out until the middle of May, along with its cousins the tulips? Well, we went on this expedition in a pony phaeton, leaving it at the wood and the meadows, and walking about there and gathering flowers, so that of some ten miles we contrived to make a four hours’ ride, and Dash ran away four several times, beguiled by hares and so forth, and had a démêlé, [3] which I should like you to have seen and heard, with a huge hedgehog, whose passive resistance was too much for my poor pet, but which we brought home in a basket, and put into the kitchen garden, where there is a hedge and water, and from which if he should choose to run away he can. I think he won’t, for he was very sociable in coming home, and as we put milk in his way, and shall continue to do so, I expect him to remain in that state of semi-tameness, which, in the country, is what I like best to see in birds or wild animals, protected but not confined. My love to your doves. How I wish the eggs might be good! It would be such a delight to you to help the parent birds to bring up their young. I told the story of the bird’s nest-making to my young artist Edmund Havell, [4] and he said, “What a picture!” If he painted faces as well as he paints animals, I am sure that he would try.
So far as I can find, the people who call themselves scientific never chance upon useful inventions, and the objects that they pursue are as devoid of use as they are of beauty. Moreover, they are themselves, for the most part, so scornful and conceited, that we are at perfect liberty to “scorn the scorner.” [5] Only think, for instance, of botanists, who know no more of the cultivation of a plant than the desk I am writing on, despising florists and horticulturists, who bring the lovely flowers and the goodly thing, fruit, to such perfection! And they can’t even agree about their own jargon! We had the other day a pitched battle in my garden between a set of Linnæans and a set of Jussieuans. [6] Oh! if you had heard the clatter! I was fain to bring forth my own list of new annuals (I have sixty, most of which have never blown [7] in England), and had the glory of out-long-wording both parties, to the shame of floriculture, who ought to speak plain. I wish you had been present; it was a curious scene. The best stroke at science which I have met with for a long time is in the last “Pickwick.” [8] I hope you love humor; I, for my part, delight in it, and hold Mr. Dickens to be the next great benefactor of the age to Sir Walter Scott. There is about him, too, an anti-cant and anti-humbug spirit which is worth anything.
My book is called “Country Stories.” It is passing slowly through the press, and will not, I suppose, be advertised till nearly ready. I speak the real truth in saying that I do not like it. If ever I did like any of my prose works it was “Belford Regis,” and this is more in the way of “Our Village.” Mr. Browning seems studiously to have thrown poetry aside in his tragedy, as Shelley did; though I doubt if his subject can be so dramatic as the horribly powerful story of the “Cenci.”
And now, my ever-dear love, Heaven bless you! We are going flowering again, to a copse full of primroses and ground ivy, and wood anemones. I wish you were with us!
Ever yours,
M. R. M.
Address: Miss Barrett, Gloucester Place.
Text: L’Estrange (2), III, 69–71.
1. L’Estrange has “Penge Wood” but maps of the period show Pinge Wood, a short distance N.W. of Three-Mile Cross and S.W. of Reading.
2. Reading stood on the River Kennet, at its confluence with the Thames. The stretch west of Reading, towards Newbury, offered a “beautiful combination of hills, woodlands and river-laced meadows which have proved so full of allurement to certain artists …” (Reading and Its Surroundings, Arthur H. Anderson, 1906, p. 165).
3. “Quarrel.”
4. Probably the son of William Havell (1782–1857), landscape painter, who was born and raised in Reading, and whose family retained connections with the area.
5. Proverbs, 3:34.
6. Protagonists of rival systems of botany. Carl von Linné (1707–78), the Swedish botanist, propounded an artificial or sexual system of classification. This was superseded by the natural system of Antoine Laurent de Jussieu (1748–1836), whose Genera Plantarum (1789) forms the basis of modern botanical classification.
7. The sense suggests “grown,” rather than L’Estrange’s reading.
8. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club appeared in monthly parts from April 1836 to November 1837.
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