SD2738. Edward Twisleton to Mary Parkman
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 31, 314 (in part).
Hereford
Decbr 16 1864
My dear Mary
This letter ought to reach you between Christmas and New Year’s Day. I wish you and yours many happy returns of the New Year. …
I have seen Carlyle several times lately, having had walks with him at the strange hour of ten o’clock at night, as if we were two Conspirators. I met him and Robert Browning on Sunday at Mr Forster’s at dinner, and was not a little amused by the strength of his, C’s, expressions of hatred towards Representative Government, and the British Constitution; which he would knock on the head at once and put out of the world, if he could. He hopes in two months to have finished his two remaining volumes of Frederick the Great, and then, as he now says, he intends never again to write for publication. If he could only find his Frederick the Great now living in England, I well know the work which would be imposed upon the said Frederick by “the Eternal Destinies.” Luckily the Eternal Destinies do not find the English mind at all favorable to the reception of their ideas.– Dear Mrs Carlyle is wonderfully recovered. I see her very often. The great peril from which she has escaped has infused the most touching tenderness into Carlyle’s relations with her–
One of the best Acts of Robert Browning’s life has been his having lately saved a young Lady from marriage with Hume the Medium. The young Lady who had about £800 a year in her own right had been wooed by Hume at some Continental Watering Place, and, not knowing his History, had engaged herself to him. Afterwards by accident she saw in a Newspaper a letter from the said Hume, imputing the hostility of Browning, as evinced in “Sludge the Medium” to a Spirit’s having passed over Browning and crowned Mrs Browning as a Poet by preference [1] . The young Lady had sufficient good sense to regard this suggestion as ridiculous, and, through her two Guardians that had been, or rather through her Guardian’s Wife, consulted Browning as to what he knew of Hume. Browning behaved unexceptionably well, and in an interview with the Guardian’s Wife, whom he had never seen before, stated what he had seen himself, and what he knew on good authority from others. The match was broken off—Mr Hume went to America—and Browning has received letters of the warmest acknowledgement from the young Lady, and the Lady who visited him. Had it not been for the stupidly malignant letter of Mr Hume, he might possibly have accomplished his object—the young Lady knowing very little of his “spiritual powers.” …
Publication: None traced.
Manuscript: Harvard University.
1. See The Spiritual Magazine, July 1864, pp. 310–317.
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