SD2310. Elizabeth Clementine Kinney to Edmund Clarence Stedman
Published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 338 (in part).
Villa Buccellini, Via Nuova
near Piazza del Carmine, Florence
December 22nd 1859.
My dear Edmund:
Your “Diamond Wedding” has had a success in Florence very flattering to you & to me: all our friends, who do not take the N.Y. Tribune, or, who do not read it at the public reading-rooms, as the others do, have in turn sent to me for a copy of it—even Mrs Browning, Mrs Stowe, who is here, Mrs. Trollope etc,—& have all expressed the highest admiration of the poem. So had you listened to the call of maternal love, & have come to me for the winter, you would have been warmly welcomed in the charmed circle as well for your own sake as for mine. That I am delighted with the very clever & poetic satire, is not surprising: nor is the pride that I feel in my son on account of it more so; nor, that his success should be as near and dear to me—ay, even dearer—than my own; nor, that, should he continue to succeed in his literary efforts, I should feel repaid for lost hopes in any failures of my own. I am also quite as pleased, & so is Mr Kinney, with your “Ballad of the Times” on poor staunch old Brown as with the satire which you call a poetic heresy, or, rather, a “heresy of poesy.” It has but just reached me, yet I have read it to Mr Powers, who seemed greatly to feel it—he is all alive for the hero-victim—& said the last verse was “glorious.” Mrs Stowe has spoken for it next, & I presume that it also will go the rounds, & return to me full of scars & of honors. … Let successes (& pray God you have many!) elevate, not elate you. I shall feel as much anxiety about your forth-coming volume as I did about my own. If it succeeds it will more than recompense me for the failure of my own. What was the poem on old Brown originally published in? Satire may be heresy in poetry—but you have a special gift for it, & may do a great good by satirizing things open to ridicule. I understand that your “Diamond Wedding” prevented another ostentatious marriage-display that was to have come off at Boston. Bartlett has made an ass of himself, which he was, by the bye, before: he only shoots his length of [illegible word] now in the world’s face. …
Publication: Laura Stedman and George M. Gould, Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman (New York, 1910), 1, 198–199 (in part).
Manuscript: Columbia University.
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