SD2555. Thomas Woolner to Emily Tennyson
Published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 343 (in part).
29, Welbeck Street, W.,
February 19, 1862.
My dear Mrs. Tennyson,
… I saw and spent nearly two hours with Browning on Sunday, and found him as interesting as ever. He is cut to the quick at his wife’s death and sometimes, when anything verges near the subject his voice stops altogether, and his manner pierces one’s soul with grief; yet notwithstanding the awe which such overwhelming sorrow commands, I could not help feeling a kind of deep and wild delight, that I really saw a man who could feel the death of a wife, as one’s old-fashioned notions thought a wife’s death ought to be felt. It was to me a gust of fresh wholesome air; for truly the way the world lives with regard to the greatest and highest things is well nigh enough to make belief in them sicken and die altogether; and it needs the occasional sight of how a true woman or a great man feels and lives for a poor or ordinary individual to be able to sustain anything of a large heroic faith.
Text: Amy Woolner, Thomas Woolner, R.A., Sculptor and Poet: His Life in Letters (London, 1917), p. 215.
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