SD2122. Frederick Tennyson to Alfred Tennyson & Emily Tennyson
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 270 (in part).
[?Pisa]
[ca. December] [1857]
… Things are a source of continual apprehension to me, how it all will end I know not. …
Parker has not yet sold off that wretched book of mine it appears. I hear no more from him, and though Donne calls him the Prince of Publishers and he is certainly kind, gentlemanlike and an educated man, his own personal qualifications seem to be the only wealth he possesses. He was at Florence in April ’56, when we were living outside the Porta Romana, at a place called the Villa Brichieri, Brinsley Norton, that singular boy, occupying the ground floor of said domicile. Parker had just published a volume of poems by him which he intituled Pinocchi or Seeds of the Pine; that is to say that out of this small beginning he, Brin, would emerge like the pine which is to be “the mast of some great Ammiral” from its seedling. …
Mrs. Browning is anxious to know if Alfred takes any interest in the “spiritual manifestations,” she herself I believe is totally absorbed in this subject and believes that “good will come out of it.” Browning like most literary men either denies the evidence in favour of the facts, or the faculty of observation in others, appearing to me, like all sceptics of this slapdash school, to wind through the most labyrinthine intricacies of credulity in order to justify their incredulity. Alfred will smile perhaps when I say that I have no more doubt of the reality of these phenomena than I have of my own existence and the approaching end of the world. …
Text: Hallam Tennyson, Materials for a Life of A.T. (London, 1895), 2, 291–294.
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