SD1208.1. Harriet Martineau to Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 8.
Tynemouth
20 May [1844]
Dear Sir Edward
Are serious about not knowing who Miss Barrett is? Vide “the Nine Muses” of the Quarterly, wherein she holds a chief place. And did you not see her papers on the early Greek Christian Poets in the Athenaeum? She is a wonderful creature,—closely confined by illness now for (I think) 7 years, & only (in that case) 23 when she lay down, as all thought, to a slow death. But she writes that she is somewhat better,—she gets out in fine weather. I enclose a copy of her unpublished poem, wh I mentioned,—given to her cousin, Mr Kenyon, on his paraphrasing Schiller’s Gods of Greece. Some of her poems published with “the Seraphim” are very beautiful, I don’t like “the Seraphim,” though there is promise of what she could do. …
I am in no hurry for “Pan” back again, as I have another copy; but no copy must be taken.– I don’t defend her rhymes, but, on the contrary, am in a perpetual wonder at them. Your asking who she is seems to me almost as ridiculous as if she asked the same of you. It also proves that you have not seen “the New Spirit of the Age,” wherein we all figure. Truly it is not worth your while, for it is a poor concern, except one or two,—Landor, Tennyson,—& bits here & there. The portrait of Tennyson is capital—Carlyle’s & Browning’s exactly like.
I hope you will like “Pan.” …
Publication: The Collected Letters of Harriet Martineau, ed. Deborah Anne Logan (London, 2007), 2, 301.
Manuscript: Lord Cobbold.
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