6074. William Maynard Gomm to RB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 32, 334.
10, New Street, Spring Gardens.
June 10th /68
My dear Mr Browning,
I have at length pluck’d up courage to send you my Translations from the Ballads of Schiller [1] promised you some time since by Lady Gomm, [2] for a moment’s perusal.
And pray, do not let the first portion of the little Volume arrest your attention for half of that moment, but begin where I have inserted the Sonnet that I told you the other Evening had escaped me on the little Mola “Hagar” [3] that I was showing you.–
For all which invoking your plenary indulgence, I beg you to believe me to remain,
faithfully yours
Wm Gomm [4]
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library.
1. We have been unable to trace any published translations of Schiller by Gomm. Years later, RB told Daniel Sargent Curtis that “F.M. Sir Wm Gomm gave me his poems (Diary of D.S. Curtis, 9 November 1889, ms at Marciana).
2. Elizabeth Ann Gomm (née Kerr, 1804–77), daughter of Maj.-Gen. Lord Kerr (1780–1843) and his wife, Mary (née Gilbert, 1783–1861). She married Gomm, as his second wife, in 1830.
3. One of several depictions of the Biblical character Hagar, concubine of Abraham and mother of Ishmael, painted and drawn by Pier Francesco Mola (1612–66). Gomm owned “about six or seven pictures, admirable specimens of the best masters of the 17th century” (Gustav Friedrich Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain, [trans. Elizabeth Eastlake], 3 vols., 1854, II, 337).
4. Field Marshal Sir William Maynard Gomm (1784–1875), fought in the Peninsula Campaign and at the battles of Quatre Bras and Waterloo. He served as commander-in-chief of Bombay from 1850 to 1855 and was named Field Marshal in 1868 (see ODNB).
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