SD1120.2. Eliza Flower to Richard Hengist Horne

Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 4.

[London]

[27 April 1840]

<***> Ah Sordello! It is madness I think. One never minds, one likes, obscurity & misty shrouding: haze is often excess of light: and the outline may be as faint as possible through the veil, & so much the more stimulative & suggestive. Infinity has no boundary line: and sensation we know can distance thought. But Sordello has none of this charm: it is intertwisted & involved to distortion: confusion worse confounded: it is like walking over the rough & spiky shingles that give way on the shelving beach, while you make no way, and get your shoes full of stones: meanwhile the consciousness of a lovely & melodious ocean felt at intervals. I am as sure as I am of my own existence, sure that Robert Browning is a natural born Poet, & of a very superb quality he dives deep, & his pearls are of the largest & the loveliest order: and that he should be satisfied with that monstrous failure is I am clear, delirium, or infatuation as to approach to it. The close of the fifth book is the most extraordinary part: is it not like the incoherent snatches & raving of a mad man? <***>

Text: Gertrude Reese Hudson, Robert Browning’s Literary Life (Austin, Texas), p. 86 (in part).

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