728. EBB to Hugh Stuart Boyd
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 226–229.
Torquay.
Jany 29. 1840–
My ever dear friend,
It was very pleasant to me to see your seal upon a letter once more,—and although the letter itself left me with a mournful impression of your having passed some time so much less happily than I could wish & pray for you, yet there remains the pleasant thought to me still, that you have not altogether forgotten me. Do receive the expression of my most affectionate sympathy under this & every circumstance: & I fear that the shock to your nerves & spirits could not be a light one,—however impressed you might be & must be with the surety & verity of God’s love working in all His will. Poor poor Patience!– Coming to be so happy with you, with that joyous smile I thought so pretty!– Do you not remember my telling you so?– Well—it is well & better for her,—happier for her, if God in Christ Jesus have received her, than her hopes were of the holiday time with you– The holiday is for ever now ..
“Gone from work, & taen her wages”– [1]
I am thinking of Kate—poor Kate!– How old is she?– Quite a child—is she not? [2] —yet not too young, having felt the “much affliction” [3] to rejoice in the “joy of the Holy Ghost”– [4] Do tell me when you write, dear Mr Boyd, how she is & how her spirits are, and whether you mean to let her return to school. If I were you I would not permit it– Do not, unless you cannot help it, or object to her remaining with you on other grounds than any I am aware of—for indeed that return wd be very desolate & distressing to her—that return alone!–
I heard from Nelly Bordman only a few days before receiving your letter, & so far from preparing me for all this sadness & gloom she pleased me with her account of you whom she had lately seen—dwelling upon your retrograde passage into youth & the delight you were taking in the presence & society of some still more youthful, fair, & gay monstrum amandum, [5] some prodigy of intellectual accomplishment, some little Circe who never turned anybodies into pigs. [6] I learnt too from her for the first time that you were settled at Hampstead! Whereabout at Hampstead, & for how long? She did’nt tell me that, thinking of course that I knew something more about you than I do– Yes indeed! You do treat me very shabbily– I agree with you in thinking so. To think that so many hills & woods shd interpose between us—that I shd be lying here, fast bound by a spell, a sleeping Beauty in a forest, & that you who used to be such a doughty knight shd not take the trouble of cutting through even a hazel tree with your good sword, to find out what had become of me!!– Now do tell me, the hazel tree being down at last, whether you mean to live at Hampstead, whether you have taken a house there & have carried your books there, & wear Hampstead grasshoppers in your bonnet (as they did at Athens) [7] to prove yourself of the soil!——
All this nonsense will make you think I am better—and indeed I am pretty well just now– Quite, however, confined to the bed—except when lifted from it to the sofa baby-wise while they make it,—& even then apt to faint. Bad symptoms too do not leave me,—& I am obliged to be blistered every few days—but I am free from any attack just now, & am a good deal less feverish than I am occasionally. There has been a consultation between an Exeter physician & my own [8] —& they agree exactly—both hoping that with care I shall pass the winter, & rally in the spring—both hoping that I may be able to go about again with some comfort & independence, although I never can be fit again for anything like exertion.
Dr Scully, the physician who attends me now & has done so since poor Dr Barry’s death, (of which you may have heard as affecting me most painfully last October) is a highly intelligent man besides being one of the very kindest in the world. The world calls him a Roman Catholic,—& he calls himself a whig of the [illegible word] æra—rather a curious contradiction. [9] The explanatory truth is that he is no more a Roman Catholic than I am– He holds the right of private judgment as firmly with clenched hands as Luther did. I am not able to talk much—indeed my voice has wasted to a whisper,—but he & I talk a little every day on the occasion of his daily visit—and he brought me a book last week, a catalogue raisonnè of Dr Parr’s library in which, among the Patres ecclesiastici [10] “my heart leaped up to see” [11] the mention of your select passages—by S Boyd, 1810. [12] No observation upon it.
Do you know, did you ever hear anything of Mr Horne who wrote Cosmo de Medici & the Death of Marlowe, & is now desecrating his powers (I beg your pardon) by writing the life of Napoleon?– [13] By the way, he is the author of a dramatic sketch in the last Finden.
He is in my mind one of the very first poets of the day,—& has written to me so kindly (offering although I never saw him in my life, to cater for me in literature & send me down anything likely to interest me in the periodicals) that I cannot but think his amiability & genius do honor to one another.
Do you remember Mr Caldicott who used to preach in the infant schoolroom at Sidmouth– He died here the death of a saint, as he had lived a saintly life—about three weeks ago– [14] It affected me a good deal. But he was always so associated in my thoughts more with heaven than earth, that scarcely a transition seems to have passed upon his locality. “Present with the Lord” [15] is true of him now,—even as “having his conversation in Heaven” [16] was formerly. There is little difference.
May it be so with us all—with you & with me, my ever & very dear friend!– In the meantime do not forget me. I never can forget you–
Your affectionate & grateful
Elizabeth B Barrett
Arabel desires her love to be offered to you–
Address: H S Boyd Esqr / 26 Downshire Hill / Hampstead / near London.
Publication: EBB-HSB, pp. 234–237 (as 29 May 1840).
Manuscript: Wellesley College.
1. Cymbeline, IV, 2, 261.
2. There is nothing in the secondary correspondence to help identification. The references to “holiday time” and “return to school” suggest that Patience and Kate were sisters visiting Boyd, perhaps related to his late wife.
3. II Corinthians, 2:4.
4. Romans, 14:17.
5. “Lovable monster,” doubtless a play on the “monstrum horrendum” (“dreadful monster”) of Vergil’s Æneid, which EBB quotes elsewhere.
6. In The Odyssey (bk. X, 229ff.).
7. Thucydides (bk. I, cap. 6) tells of the older Athenian men “fastening up their hair in a knot held by a golden grasshopper as a brooch.”
9. The “curious contradiction” being that it was the Whigs who established the Protestant succession to the throne.
10. “Fathers of the church.”
11. Cf. Wordsworth’s lines “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold” (1802).
12. A second edition, corrected and enlarged, of Boyd’s Select Passages of the Writings of St. Chrysostom, St. Gregory Nazianzen, and St. Basil was published in 1810. The Catalogue mentioned by EBB was published by John Bohn and Joseph Mawman in 1827 (see Reconstruction, A1815).
13. Horne’s History of Napoleon (1840); Mary Gillies was his collaborator.
14. Believed to be the Rev. William Marriott Caldecott (b. 1801?), who had died on 9 January.
15. II Corinthians, 5:8.
16. Cf. Philippians, 3:20.
___________________
