SD2293. Sarianna Browning to Joseph Milsand
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 334–335.
[Paris]
Wednesday morning. [12 October 1859]
My dear Mr Milsand,
Many thanks for your welcome letter,—I am glad that you like Ba’s poem [“A Tale of Villafranca”], which is very characteristic, especially the verse that she herself has supplied. I will tell her when I write, that it has pleased you and your mother, and I know she will be gratified. I heard that it was going the round of the English papers. Since my last epistle to you, I have twice had long letters from Italy, from both our wanderers, full of pleasant gossip and kind love. They are still lingering at Siena, tempted by the beauty of the scenery and the weather, though they talked of returning to Florence on Saturday. Robert describes their villa, which is a mile and a half from the nearest city gate, at the end of a long lane set with hedges and very old chestnut trees, the whole being a narrow ridge, in which a carriage cannot turn, between two vallies, with the city of Siena overlooking one side of these, and distant mountains the other. The country is quietly charming, with an attractive mixture of wildness & cultivation,—the villa itself being a great, airy, bare place in the middle of vineyards,—the walks between them, rows of turf with hedges of vine. Then Robert proceeds to pour forth into my private ear, as he always does when irritated, a graphic and comical account of divers dear friends and adorers, some spiritualists whom he has caught out in an imposition as he suspected. Ba’s health is improving, but she is still too weak to walk, and is carried up & down stairs, and to the carriage. Her last illness was very serious, she tells me, begging me not to mention it in any quarter likely to reach her sisters, that the doctor’s considered there was pressure of the lungs on the heart. It will be absolutely necessary to pass the winter in Rome, as any fresh irritation of the lungs might be fatal. Robert talked of wintering at Palermo, but she objected to crossing the Mediterranean, and is going to Rome, to meet the revolution, as she says. Mr Landor is quite well; Robert has found him an apartment, a housekeeper (Wilson) and above all, a little dog quite to his mind, and he passes his time writing Latin Alcaics against his wife and Louis Napoleon. Ba says the old lion laughs carnivorously when she tells him that he will be compelled one day to write an ode in praise of the emperor, to please her. As for Pen, he has been enjoying the country to his heart’s content, driving bullock carts, up to his shoulders in grapes, helping to keep the sheep, and fetch in the stray cows, making himself generally useful to his friends the contadini, besides reading and expounding to them revolutionary poems in the evenings. He has been coaxing his papa into buying the little Sardinian poney that he gallops about on, and an American artist has taken a portrait of him & his poney of which I am to have a photograph.
Robert informs me that the new edition of Ba’s works has sold 550 copies in a couple of months. Now I think I have told you all the news of them—they send their best love to you. The last letters referred to the sad loss of our dear friend Capt. Pritchard, of which I had written to Robert, who was strongly attached to him, and grateful for his remembrance at the last,—he has left me in his will, all his books, manuscripts & papers, and a thousand pounds. Robert tells me of another painful death,—that of dear Lady Arnould who went out with her husband, the new judge, and died just as she reached Bombay. I think they were the happiest couple I ever knew. I pity him, poor fellow, and he has no children to fill her place, and occupy his thoughts. Life has its sad pains—and yet, such as it is, how we cling to it! and its saddest part seems its transitoriness. <***>
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Armstrong Browning Library, Joseph Milsand Archive.
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