656. RB to Euphrasia Fanny Haworth
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 66–69.
[London]
Tuesday Evening. [24 July 1838] [1]
Dear Miss Haworth,
Do look at a Fuchsia in full bloom & notice the clear little honey-drop depending from every flower .. I have but just found it out, to my no small satisfaction,—a bee’s breakfast,—I only answer for the long blossomed sort, though,—indeed, for this plant in my room. Taste & be Titania, [2] —you can, that is.– All this while, I forget that you will perhaps never guess the good of the discovery: I have, you are to know, such a love for flowers and leaves—some leaves—that I every now & then,—in an impatience at being unable to possess myself of them thoroughly, to see them quite, satiate myself with their scent,—bite them to bits .. so there will be some sense in that. How I remember the flowers—even grapes—of places I have seen!—some one flower or weed, I should say, that gets some strange how connected with them. Snowdrops & Tilsit in Prussia go together; Cowslips & Windsor-park, for instance: flowering palm and some place or other in Holland. Now to answer what can be answered in the letter I was happy to receive last week. I am quite well– I did not expect you would write; for none of your written reasons, however. You will see Sordello in a trice, if the fagging-fit holds. [3] I did not write six lines while absent (except a scene in a play, jotted down as we sailed thro’ the Straits of Gibraltar)—but I did hammer out some four, two of which are addressed to you, two to the Queen .. the whole to go in Book 3—perhaps. I called you, “Eyebright”—meaning a simple & sad sort of translation of “Euphrasia” into my own language: folks would know who Euphrasia, or Fanny was; [4] and I should not know Ianthe or Clemanthe. [5] Not that there is any thing in them to care for, good or bad. Shall I say “Eyebright”.? I was disappointed in one thing, Canova. [6] What companions should I have? The story of the ship must have reached you “with a difference” as Ophelia says; [7] my sister told it to a Mr Dow, who delivered it, I suppose, to Forster, who furnished Macready with it, who made it over &c&c&c– As short as I can tell, this way it happened: the Captain woke me one bright Sunday Morning to say there was a ship floating keel uppermost half a mile off; they lowered a boat, made ropes fast to some floating canvass, & towed her towards our vessel. Both met half-way, and the little air that had risen an hour or two before, sank at once. Our men made the wreck fast, and went to breakfast in high glee at the notion of having “new trousers out of the sails,” and quite sure she was a french boat, broken from her moorings at Algiers, close by. Ropes were next hove (hang this sea-talk) round her stancheons, and after a quarter of an hours pushing at the capstan, the vessel righted suddenly, one dead body floating out; five more were in the forecastle, and had probably been there a month under a blazing African sun .. don’t imagine the wretched state of things. They were, these six, the “watch below”—(I give you the results of the day’s observation)—the rest, some eight or ten, had been washed overboard at first. One or two were Algerines, the rest Spaniards. The vessel was a smuggler bound for Gibraltar; there were two stupidly-disproportionate guns, taking up the whole deck, which was convex and—nay, look you, these are the gun-rings, and the black square the place where the bodies lay.
Well, the sailors covered up the hatchway, broke up the aft-deck, hauled up tobacco & cigars, good Lord such heaps of them, and then bale after bale of prints & chintz, don’t you call it, till the Captain was half frightened—he would get at the ship’s papers, he said; so these poor fellows were pulled up, piecemeal, and pitched into the sea, the very sailors calling to each other “to cover the faces”: no papers of importance were found, however, but fifteen swords, powder & ball enough for a dozen such boats, and bundles of cotton &c that would have taken a day to get out, but the Captain vowed that after five-o clock she should be cut adrift: accordingly she was cast loose, not a third of her cargo having been touched; and you can hardly conceive the strange sight when the battered hulk turned round, actually, and looked at us, and then reeled off, like a mutilated creature from some scoundrel french surgeon’s lecture-table, into the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world: there,—only, thank me for not taking you at your word and giving you the whole “story”. “What I did”? I went to Trieste, then Venice—then thro’ Treviso & Bassano to the mountains, delicious Asolo, all my places and castles, you will see. Then to Vicenza, Padua & Venice again. Then to Verona, Trent, Inspruck [sic] (the Tyrol) Munich, “Wurzburg in Franconia”! [8] Frankfort & Mayence,—down the Rhine to Cologne, thence to Aix-la-Chapelle Liège, and Antwerp—then home. Forgive this blurring, and believe it was only a foolish quotation: [9] – Shall you come to town, any where near town, soon? I shall be off again as soon as my book is out whenever that will be. This sort of thing gets intolerable and I had better have done. I never read that book of Miss Martineau’s so can’t understand what you mean. Macready is looking well; I just saw him yesterday for a minute after the play: his Kitely was Kitely [10] —superb “from his flat cap down to his shining shoes”– [11] I saw very few Italians, “to know,” that is. Those I did see I liked. Your friend Pepoli has been lecturing here, has he not? [12]
I shall be vexed if you don’t write soon,—a long Elstree-letter:– What are you doing—drawing—writing?
Ever yours truly
R Browning.
Address, on integral page: Miss Haworth, / Barham Lodge, / Elstree. / RB.
Publication: LRB, pp. 1–3.
Manuscript: British Library.
1. Dated by RB’s return from Italy and his seeing Macready in the role of Kitely.
2. Queen of the Fairies. From the context, it seems probable that RB was thinking rather of Ariel’s song, “Where the bee sucks” (The Tempest, V, 1, 88).
3. Despite this comment, it was not until May 1839 that the poem was finished, and March 1840 when it was published.
4. “My English Eyebright, if you are not glad” etc. (Sordello, III, 967ff.)
5. Ianthe, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was a Cretan girl transformed into a young man. The name was much used in 19th century literature: Byron dedicated Childe Harold to Ianthe, meaning the 11-year-old Lady Charlotte Harley; Landor used the name for his early sweetheart, Sophia Jane Swift; Shelley gave the name to his eldest daughter, and also to a maiden in Queen Mab. Clemanthe, daughter of Medon, High Priest of the Temple of Apollo, was a character in Talfourd’s Ion.
6. Antonio Canova (1757–1822), Italian sculptor, patronized by Napoleon. While in Italy, RB had visited Possagno, where Canova’s studio had been made into a small museum, in which some of his work was exhibited. Katharine de Kay Bronson, in her article “Browning in Asolo” (The Century Magazine, no. 59, April 1900, pp. 920–931; reprinted in More Than Friend, ed. Michael Meredith, 1985, pp. 127–145), wrote of RB’s visit: “Such was his interest in art in all its branches that he had the patience to examine the uninteresting collection of Canova’s drawings in water-color, which present the appearance of very early attempts of a not very promising aspirant to fame.”
7. Hamlet, IV, 5, 183.
8. The locus of the first part of Paracelsus.
9. RB has obliterated a passage of about three lines.
10. In Every Man in His Humour (1598) by Ben Jonson (1572–1637), performed on 23 July 1838 at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.
11. Every Man in His Humour, II, 1, 103.
12. Count Carlo Pepoli (1796–1881), Italian author who wrote the libretto for Bellini’s I Puritani, had established a course in Italian history and beaux-arts in Paris in 1837. The Times of 19 June 1838 referred to a course of lectures in the history of music being given by him during June and July (in French) at the Marylebone Institute in London. He held the Chair of Italian Literature at London University from 1839 to 1848.
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