SD2490. Elizabeth Clementine Kinney to Edmund Clarence Stedman
Published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 29, 300 (in part).
Casa Cardinali Piccola
Bagani di Lucca
August 3d 1861.
My dearest Edmund:
Just after mine of June 28th (a long epistle) was dispatched, (it always happens so) I received your line (I never get a letter from you now-a-days) accompanying your interesting newspaper correspondence. …
We are all struck down by the unexpected death of Mrs Browning. Alas! the brightest of our stars has set at noonday—“Casa Guidi Windows are darkened!” I wrote you that the Brownings had gone to Siena for the Summer, but they did not get off before she was prostrated with the last struggle of a disease which has been slowly consuming her for twenty years. For a long while she has had but one lung, & so feeble was she always, that when the end came, no one suspected it. Miss Blagden (an English author, her closest friend) writes me that she left her at 8 o’clock in the evening, never once dreaming that her attack was more serious than the many she had rallied from; that Mrs Browning’s darling boy, of ten years, said only his usual affectionate “good night” to her, after which she began to talk with her husband of their earlier married life, & to revert to scenes of tenderness without any symptom of a suspicion that they would not be repeated: she however had a hard fit of coughing, which led him to support her as usual, & watch her as he often did through the night. She continued to talk until 4 o’clock in the morning when her head fell on his shoulder & he thought at last she had fallen asleep—when, looking, behold so peacefully had God given his beloved sleep from which was no awaking! The bereaved Poet is crushed by the blow. Casa Guidi is broken up, & he leaves it forever. Will take his son to Paris & they will make it their home there with his father & sister. …
Publication: “Mrs. Kinney’s Italian Reminiscences,” ed. Laura Stedman and George M. Gould, Neale’s Monthly, 1 (January 1913), 111–112 (in part).
Manuscript: Columbia University.
___________________
