SD2455. Robert Bulwer Lytton to John Forster
Published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 288.
[Florence]
June 30 [1861]
My dearest Forster,
I believe that Isa yesterday wrote to you of the heavy loss that has befallen—a loss for our dear friend Browning irreparable, for us all a most enduring affliction. Mrs. Browning died yesterday at 4.30 a.m., without pain, as I trust, and though her head had been wandering, from the weakness of four days’ struggle with the disease that made her life ever so frail, she seems at the last to have been in full possession of her most lovely intellect, and, dying on her husband’s shoulder, her last words were words of love and blessing to him, and some allusion to the extreme beauty and glory of the state to which she was passing so gently! Browning has borne the first anguish of this blow, that leaves him, I fear, a broken life, with a meekness and fortitude divine. He seems resigned and heroic under suffering as only such a brave, and noble, and unselfish soul can be. I am just going to him, but write thus much because I know that yesterday he expressed the wish that I should write and tell you all. I think he will go at once to Paris. I fear his pain will be harder to bear day by day. My heart bleeds for him, so will yours, I know. I have lost for myself a most dear, true friend. A lovelier life never went back to God.
Text: Personal & Literary Letters of Robert First Earl of Lytton, ed. Betty Balfour (London, 1906), I, 131.
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