SD2351. Elizabeth Clementine Kinney to Edmund Clarence Stedman
Published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 345–346 (in part).
Florence
March 10 1860
My dear Edmund
I was just cutting off a curl of my hair to send you, when yours of Feby 6th coming upon me …
Mrs Browning is in Rome & not at Paris. And this makes me think: Miss Blagden, an English authoress here, & intimate friend of the Brownings, liked your “Ballad of the Times” [“John Brown’s Invasion”] which I lent her, so well, that she sent it to Mrs Browning, who writes from Rome that both she and her husband are so delighted with it, that they beg to keep it a little longer to show to some of their literary friends. I saw Mrs Browning’s letter in which she said that “there is an individuality of meaning & a rugged strength in it,” which strikes her wonderfully, “while at the same time it is melodious & artistic.” Mr Browning bids Miss Blagden congratulate me & say that it is a long time since he has seen anything that pleased him so well. This is quite wonderful for them, who scarce ever find cause for praise in any modern poet, save Tennyson! In fact, the only other thing I have known Mrs B. to be pleased with, was the Sonnet Moonlight in Italy, which I sent you recently, & of which Cleveland Cox[e]—himself no mean poet—said, it was worthy of the old Masters of the Sonnet. Mrs Trollope & Mrs Stowe were also delighted with your Ballad. By the bye, Mrs Stowe & party went to Rome from here in Feb’y. She left me a beautifully bound copy of her master-work, as I think, “The Minister’s Wooing.” She is a noble woman, unprepossessing, but wearing like gold. I love her much & shall prize her parting-gift. … I am afraid that you write too much for your health; & as for stump-speaking you have not the lungs for it, even if that were befitting the dignity of an earnest thinker. Pray do nothing to demean the talent—I may say the gift divine—which is in you.
Publication: Laura Stedman and George M. Gould, Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman (New York, 1910), 1, 199 (in part)
Manuscript: Columbia University.
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