SD2140. Algernon Charles Swinburne to Edwin Hatch

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 25, 344 (in part).

Oxford,

February 17 [1858]

My dear Hatch

I commiserate you sincerely; but I have two things to comfort you with:—(1) Morris’s book is really out. Reading it, I would fain be worthy to sit down at his feet; but I have a painful recollection of Aurora Leigh:

Almost all the birds

Will sing at dawn; and yet we do not take

The chattering swallow for the holy lark! …

But I suspect I must be Eglamor to Morris as Sordello.

I long to be with you by firelight between the sunset and the sea to have talk of Sordello; it is one of my canonical scriptures. Does he sleep and forget? I think yes. Did the first time Palma’s mouth trembled to touch his in the golden rose-lands of Paradise, a sudden power of angelic action come over him? I suspect, not utterly companionless. Sometimes one knows—not now: but I suppose he slept years off before she kissed him. In Heaven she grew too tired and thin to sing well, and her face grew whiter than its aureole with pain and want of him. And if, like the other Saint, she wept, the tears fell upon his shut lids and fretted the eyes apart as they trickled. Who knows these matters? Only we keep the honey-stain of hair.

Text: The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang (New Haven, Conn., 1959–62), 1, 15–18.

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