SD1483. Edward FitzGerald to Edward Byles Cowell

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 267 (in part).

Boulge, Woodbridge

June 13/51

My dear Cowell,

You will believe I think of you much oftener than I write to you. … I see extracts in the Athenaeum from a new poem of Mrs. Barrett Browning—“Casa Guidi Windows”—a Dantesque survey of Italy—and really I am compelled to think her now a greater Poet than Tennyson! That it should come to this! I don’t mean that what she writes is equal to what he wrote, and was born to write; but better than what he has lately done or (as I fear) ever will do again. Mrs. Browning writes on a noble, stirring, and 19th century subject; dashing away at rhyme and rhythm; often failing, often succeeding; at all events preserving the charm of impulse and go; not “added and altered many times till all is ripe and rotten.” Yet I do not believe her Poems are good enough to live; while the Princess will survive on the strength, I believe, of Mort d’Arthur, Miller’s Daughter etc. …

Text: The Letters of Edward FitzGerald, ed. A. M. and A. B. Terhune (Princeton, 1980), 2, 31–32.

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