818. EBB to Richard Hengist Horne
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 55–57.
[Torquay]
June 13th 1841.
My dear Mr Horne,
I am so sorry about the hooping cough. As a means of “rejuvenescence”, why one might as pleasantly pass into & through Medea’s kettle. [1] Do try to remember when you write again, & tell me how you are; & if the change of air perfects the good it has begun. For my own part I never had the hooping cough at all. I stood alone in my family & would’nt have it when everybody else was hooping.
Mind, if you please!– I wrote two notes to you instead of one, & had it not been for the fear of teazing you beyond bounds, should certainly have written a third to ask about the cough. The first was put into a dangerous envelope—out of perverseness, & faith in the right measure, & perhaps glided away. But I have sent a hundred of these little letters & received still more, & never missed or was missed till now––if now. So why should’nt I be perverse?
I am revived just now .. pleased, anxious, excited altogether in the hope of touching at last upon my last days at this place. I have been up, & bore it excellently—up, an hour at a time, without fainting—& on several days, without injury: and now am looking forwards to the journey. My physician has been open with me & is of opinion that there is a good deal of risk to be run in attempting it—but my mind is made up to go, & if the power remains to me, I will go. To be at home & relieved from the sense of doing evil where I wd soonest bring blessing, of breaking up poor Papa’s domestic peace into fragments by keeping my sisters here (& he wont let them leave me) wd urge me into any possible “risk”—to say nothing of the continual repulsion, night & day, of the sights & sounds of this dreary place. There will be no opposition—for Papa promised me at the beginning of last winter that I shd go when it became ‘possible’. Then, Dr Scully did not talk of ‘risk’, but of certain consequences. He said I shd die on the road. I know how to understand the change of phrase. There is only a ‘risk’ now—& the journey is ‘possible’. So I go–
We are to have one of the patent carriages with a thousand springs from London—& I am afraid of nothing—& shall set out, I hope, in a fortnight. Ah but, not directly to London. There is to be some intermediate place where we all must meet, Papa says, & stay for a month or two before the final settlement [2] in Wimpole Street,—and he names “Clifton,” and I pray for the neighbourhood of London, because I look far (too far, perhaps, for me) and fear being left an exile again at those Hot Wells during the winter. I don’t know what the “finality measure” may be. The only thing fixed is a journey from hence:—and “if I fall,” as the heroes say, why you and “Psyche” must walk by yourselves. She, at least, won’t be the worse for it.
Who taught this parrot its “How d’ye do?” and so much irrelevancy? You would be tired of me, even if you hadn’t the hooping-cough.
Is it true that Mr. Heraud’s magazine is downfallen? [3] And why?
But don’t answer my questions—don’t indeed write at all until you are better, and able and inclined to write. Writing is so bad—leaning to write is so bad, and I don’t suppose that you could write in the way that I do, leaning backwards instead of forwards—lying down, in fact. I write so “to the Horse Guards.”
How you would smile sarcasms and epigrams out of the “hood” if you could see from it what I have been doing, or rather suffering, lately! Having my picture taken by a lady miniature-painter who wandered here to put an old vow of mine to proof. For it wasn’t the ruling passion “strong in death,” [4] “though by your smiling you may seem to say so,” [5] but a sacrifice to papa.
Are you tossed about much by the agitation of political matters, or indifferently calm? I hear nothing from London, except what Lord Melbourne has done, or the Queen said.
Dear Mr. Horne, don’t let me mar anything in your conception with regard to the drama. Push any foolishness aside which seems to do it.
I did not understand your particular view. I thought that our philosopher (Medon), having laboriously worked himself blind with the vain, earthward, cramped strivings of his intellect, was suddenly thrown upon the verge of awaking in, and to, the spiritual world, by a casualty relating to his body itself. It was something of that sort which I seemed to discern in what you wrote. Don’t mar anything for me, dear Mr. Horne.
Truly yours,
Elizabeth B. Barrett.
Perhaps we may not be gone from hence so soon as a—a fortnight, after all. If you are inclined to write, do not hesitate about directing here, as usual, until I say more. I remember something of Broadstairs, deep in a cloud of childish thoughts.
Address: R H Horne Esqr / Post Office / Broadstairs / Kent.
Sources: Manuscript (in part) Harvard University. Text (in part) EBB-RHH, I, 25–27 (as 12 June 1841) and The Contemporary Review, XXIII, December 1873, pp. 151–153.
1. Medea, to demonstrate her powers to the daughters of Pelias, cut up an old ram, boiled the pieces in a cauldron, and then produced from them a young lamb.
2. The manuscript ends at this point; the remainder of the text is taken from the printed sources.
3. John Abraham Heraud (1799–1887), poet and dramatist, was the author of The Descent into Hell (1830) and The Judgment of the Flood (1834). He had become editor of The Monthly Magazine in 1839, a post he held until 1842, when he became editor of The Christian’s Monthly Magazine. The Monthly Magazine ceased publication in 1843. He later became dramatic critic for The Athenæum.
4. Pope, An Epistle to … Viscount Cobham (1734), line 263.
5. Hamlet, II, 2, 309–310.
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