825. Mary Russell Mitford to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 5, 70–71.
Three Mile Cross,
June 28, 1841.
First, my beloved friend, let me answer your most kind inquiries. I am greatly better. It has been a most remarkable escape; but a real escape. I can not yet turn in my bed; but when up I get about astonishingly well. To say truth, I am, and always have been, a very active person—country-born and country-bred—with great fearlessness and safety of foot and limb. Even since this misfortune, Ben having said that half the parish had mounted on a hay-rick close by to look at the garden, which lies beneath it (an acre of flowers rich in color as a painter’s palette), I could not resist the sight of the ladder, and one evening when all the men were away, climbed up to take myself a view of my flowery domain. I wish you could see it! Masses of the Siberian larkspur, and sweet-Williams, mostly double, the still brighter new larkspur (Delphinium Chinensis), rich as an oriental butterfly—such a size and such a blue! amongst roses in millions, with the blue and white Canterbury bells (also double), and the white foxglove, and the variegated monkshood, the carmine pea, in its stalwart beauty, the nemophila, like the sky above its head, the new erysimum, with its gay orange tufts, hundreds of lesser annuals, and fuchsias, zinnias, salvias, geraniums past compt; so bright are the flowers that the green really does not predominate amongst them!
Yes! I knew you would like those old houses! Ockwells surpasses in beauty and in preservation anything I ever saw. [1] Our ancestors were rare architects. Their painted glass and their carved oak are unequalled.
Heaven be with you, my dearest!
Ever yours,
M. R. Mitford.
Address: Miss Barrett, Torquay.
Text: L’Estrange (2), III, 119–120.
1. Ockwells Manor, a timbered house near Maidenhead, was described by Miss Mitford as having “a hall, with the dais and music gallery, and two tiers of windows covered with the arms of the Romeyns (by whom it was built in 1437), in the most perfect preservation … the front of the house, with its gables, is ornamented by the most splendid oak-carving, as delicate as an Indian fan” (Chorley, I, 186).
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