SD1722. Mary Brotherton to Frederick Tennyson

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 364 (in part).

Rome

March 9th, 1854

My dear Mr Tennyson,

I send you a mystic page devoutly hoping that you may put my jumbled oracles into shape like a dissected map. …

Mrs Browning is full of the sweetest faith, and is deeply interested in this “manifestation.[”] She, like yourself, wishes me to ask questions; “who writes?” &c but it seems to me perfectly presumptuous to do so of a power which may be a minister of the unquestionable God, and whatever it may be, proves itself stronger & wiser than me, the first, by knowing Greek, & the second by making me write it without knowledge. …

Publication: Letters to Frederick Tennyson, ed. Hugh J. Schonfield (London, 1930), pp. 118–120.

Manuscript: Harvard University.

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