810. RB to Samuel Laman Blanchard [1]
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 40.
New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey.
April 31. [sic] 1841.
My dear Mr Blanchard,
I have to beg the favor of your acceptance of the accompanying little Poem [2] —and to beg that you will forgive the tardiness of its arrival on the score of my having just got up from a very sick bed indeed, where a fortnight’s brain-and-liver-fever has reduced me to the shade of a shade. I shall gather strength, I hope, this fine weather. Shame—shame—shame on you that the giving of rhymes is all on my side—or—not to talk of giving—what would I do to once again run (real running, for I was a boy)—run to Bond St from Camberwell and come back with a small book [3] brimful of the sweetest and truest things in the world: it is many years ago since I gave it away to a friend nothing I could give seemed too good for—but the noble and musical lines—that fine “sun-bronzed like Triumph on a pedestal”—that bridge “dark trees were dying round”—that super-delicious “song of the wave”—live within me yet [4] —“being things immortal”. [5] Will you please to notice that I have changed my address: if in a week or two you will conquer the interminable Kent-road, and on passing the turnpike at New Cross you will take the first lane with a quick set hedge to the right, you will “descry a house resembling a goose-pie”—only a crooked hasty and rash goose-pie. We have a garden, and trees, and little green hills of a sort to go out on– Will you come? I say in a week or two, because at present I can hardly crawl and could barely shake your hand.
Yours very truly,
Robert Browning.
Laman Blanchard Esqr.
Address, on integral page: Laman Blanchard Esq.
Publication: LRB, pp. 5–6 (as April 1841).
Manuscript: University of Iowa.
1. Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804-45) contributed prose and verse to The Monthly Magazine. He published Lyric Offerings, a collection of verse dedicated to Charles Lamb, in 1828. He edited successively The Monthly Magazine, The True Sun, The Constitutional, The Court Journal and The Courier. From 1841 until his death he was closely connected with The Examiner.
2. Pippa Passes.
3. Noted at this point in the manuscript, in an unidentified hand: “Lyric Offerings—L.B.” The publisher, William Harrison Ainsworth, was located in Old Bond Street.
4. The first two quotations are taken from Blanchard’s “A Poet’s Bride” (stanzas XV and I, pp. 14 and 1, respectively); the third reference is to “The Wave” (pp. 89–91).
5. Cf. Hamlet, I, 4, 67.
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