SD1365. Edward Everett Hale to Sarah Preston Everett Hale
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 15, 363–364 (in part).
[Concord]
January 25th, 1849
Of my today the event has been a long very pleasant call from Mr. R. W. Emerson. He left Concord for Albany, today, between the arrival of his train and the departure of the Western had the whole afternoon, and called here in that time and sat an hour or more, talking wonderfully. He told of his European experiences with evident gusto. He wrote the lectures he is to deliver here in Paris in May—saw the gathering for the row of May 15th, having been at Blanqui and Barbe’s Club regularly to see what was in embryo till that outbreak. He told me the details of Robert Browning’s marrying Miss Barrett. She was an invalid—never left her bed—her father a jealous old man, who let no one see her. Browning and she had complimented each other in print, but never met. “How can I see Miss Barrett,” he cried in Carlyle’s parlour one day. And Mrs. Carlyle answered “You can’t see her at all,” giving reason as above. At which he took his cane, went to the house, asked for Miss Barrett, and by a blunder of the servant who thought him a doctor was admitted to her bed room. She had not moved for three months, was bed-ridden—but at the end of the first visit, she lifted her head in bidding him come again—the second time she sat up—the third stood—and closed the fourth by eloping with him to Italy where they are now—her cure being a complete one.
Mr. Emerson will come here to lecture on the 16th of next month.
Text: Edward E. Hale, Jr. The Life and Letters of Edward Everett Hale (Boston, 1917), I, 189–190.
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