SD2019. Thomas Woolner to Emily Tennyson
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 261–262 (in part).
27, Rutland Street,
Hampstead Road,
December 17, 1856.
My dear Mrs. Tennyson,
I am sure there never was one in the whole world kinder than you, every letter you send me is a fresh proof. … That is fine fun you write of—the Brownings having plenty of money left them. I do not care much about it tho’; for they are very well circumstanced in these matters I believe. … If I heard that poor Mrs. Browning had recovered her strength enough to enable her to dwell in England, that indeed would delight me: for at present you know it is utterly impossible for her to endure an English winter. …
One thing I know you would like, she [Lady Trevelyan] really worships your great lord, and what I admire in her, she has breadth to take in Browning also;—for I seldom find one who fervently admires both; an admirer of one generally thinks it to be his duty to pitch vigorously into the other. Browning told me he often found men trying to make friends with him by picking holes in Tennyson: he said: “If a man want to make a friend of me, he cannot begin a plan more fatal to his hopes than by finding fault with him: for I thoroughly admire everything he has written, and for a man to find fault with that, is finding fault with my own taste and judgment.” That is how I like to hear a man talk. …
Text: Amy Woolner, Thomas Woolner, R.A., Sculptor and Poet: His Life in Letters (London, 1917), pp. 125–126.
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