SD1625. Ellen Twisleton to Dwight Family
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 18, 377 (in part).
Florence.
Dec. 22d. 1852.
Dearest & best family–
I have been fortunate enough to have two sets of letters from you this week …
Yesterday, we went to see Mr & Mrs Browning again, found them at home, & continued our agreeable impression of them. Mr Browning’s manners are more like Mr Charles Sedgwick’s than anyone’s else—he has just that easy, cheerful, conversational tone, & is just as cordial.
She is very different, & very charming, but I am so horribly frightened as soon as I begin to speak to her, that I make a perfect ass of myself, & consequently dash my own satisfaction a little. She said it was hard for her to be away from her family, for she was of an anxious disposition, & was always “building dungeons in the air”: which I thought forcible. She talks no commonplaces, & is a one-er, evidently, in various different directions. …
Mary! we have found out Miss Barrett’s “name, a little name, uncadenced to the ear,” by which she exhorted her husband to call her—Ba—(pronounced like bar–) not musical or elegant, & sounding so very oddly from Mr Browning’s lips, that it has reconciled me to Edward’s system of calling me nothing but Ellen, ever, under any interest or temptation! I presume it was deduced from Elizabeth, through Betty, by some child’s lips; but it does not fit the full grown woman, except in strict privacy. I am wretched that you are not here, instead of me, to know the lady. …
Publication: Letters of the Hon. Mrs. Edward Twisleton, ed. Ellen T.P. Vaughan (London, 1928), pp. 63–64 (in part).
Manuscript: Harvard University.
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