of the publication of my ‘English Poets,’ because I did not know myself when the publication was to take place, and I hope you will forgive the innocent crime and accept the first number going to you with this note. I warn you that there will be two numbers more at _least_. Therefore do not prepare yourself for perhaps the impossible magnanimity of reading them through.
And now I am fit for rivalship with your clocks, papa having given me an Aeolian harp for the purpose. Do you know the music of an Aeolian harp, and that nothing below the spherical harmonies is so sweet and soft and mournfully wild? The amusing part of it is (after the poetical) that Flushie is jealous and thinks it is alive, and takes it as very hard that I should say ‘beautiful’ to anything except his ears!
Arabel talks of going to see you; but if you are sensible to this intense and most overcoming heat, you will pardon her staying away for the present.
We have heard to-day that Annie proposes to publish her Miscellany by subscription; and although I know it to be the only way, compatible with publication at all, to avoid a pecuniary loss, yet the custom is so entirely abandoned except in the case of persons of a lower condition of life than _your daughter_, that I am sorry to think of the observations it may excite. The whole scheme has appeared to me from the beginning _most foolish_, and if you knew what I know of the state and fortune of our ephemeral literature, you would use what influence you have with her to induce her to condemn her ‘contributions’ to the adorning of a private annual rather than the purpose in unhappy question. I wish I dared to appeal through my true love for her to her own good sense once more.
My very dear friend’s affectionate and grateful E.B.B.
If you _do_ read any of the papers, let me know, I beseech you, your full and free opinion of them.
_To H.S. Boyd_
June 22, 1842.
My very dear Friend,–I thank you gratefully for your two notes, with their united kindness and candour–the latter still rarer than the former, if less ‘sweet upon the tongue.’ Sir William Alexander’s tragedy _(that_ is the right name, I think, Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling) you will not find mentioned among my dramatic notices, because I was much pressed for room, and had to treat the whole subject as briefly as possible, striking off, like the Roman, only the heads of the flowers, and I did not, besides, receive your injunction until my third paper on the dramatists was finished and in the press. When you read it you will find some notice of that tragedy by Marlowe, the first knowledge of which I owe to you, my dear Mr. Boyd, as how much besides? And then comes the fourth paper, and I tremble to anticipate the possible–nay, the very probable–scolding I may have from you, upon my various heresies as to Dryden and Pope and Queen Anne’s versificators. In the meantime you have breathing time, for Mr. Dilke, although very gracious and courteous to my offence of extending the two papers he asked for _into four_,[65] yet could find no room in the ‘Athenaeum’ last week for me, and only _hopes_ for it this week. And after this week comes the British Association business, which always fills every column for a month, so that a further delay is possible enough. ‘It will increase,’ says Mr. Dilke, ‘the zest of the reader,’ whereas _I_ say (at least think) that it will help him quite to forget me. I explain all this lest you should blame me for neglect to yourself in not sending the papers. I am so pleased that you like at least the second article. That is encouragement to me.
Flushie did not seem to think the harp alive when it was taken out of the window and laid close to him. He examined it particularly, and is a philosophical dog. But I am sure that at first and while it was playing he thought so.
In the same way he can’t bear me to look into a glass, because he thinks there is a little brown dog inside every looking glass, and he is jealous of its being so close to _me_. He used to tremble and bark at it, but now he is _silently_ jealous, and contents himself with squeezing close, close to me and kissing me expressively.
My very dear friend’s ever gratefully affectionate E.B.B.
[Footnote 65: Ultimately five.]
_To John Kenyon_
50 Wimpole Street: Sunday night [September 1842].
My dear Mr. Kenyon,–Having missed my pleasure to-day by a coincidence worse for me than for you, I must, tired as I am to-night, tell you–ready for to-morrow’s return of the books–what I have waited three whole days hoping to tell you by word of mouth. But mind, before I begin, I don’t do so out of despair ever to see you again, because I trust steadfastly to your kindness to _come_ again when _you_ are not ‘languid’ and I am alone as usual; only that I dare not keep back from you any longer the following message of Miss Mitford. She says: ‘Won’t he take us in his way to Torquay? or from Torquay? Beg him to do so–and of all love, to tell us _when_.’ Afterwards, again: ‘I think my father is better. Tell Mr. Kenyon what I say, and stand my friend with him and beg him to come.’
Which I do in the most effectual way–in her own words.
She is much pleased by means of your introduction. ‘Tell dear Mr. Kenyon how very very much I like Mrs. Leslie. She seems all that is good and kind, and to add great intelligence and agreeableness to these prime qualities.’
Now I have done with being a messenger of the gods, and verily my caduceus is trembling in my hand.
O Mr. Kenyon! what have you done? You will know the interpretation of the reproach, your conscience holding the key of the cypher.
In the meantime I ought to be thanking you for your great kindness about this divine Tennyson.[66] Beautiful! beautiful! After all, it is a noble thing to be a poet. But notwithstanding the poetry of the novelties–and you will observe that his two preceding volumes (only one of which I had seen before, having inquired for the other vainly) are included in these two–nothing appears to me quite equal to ‘Oenone,’ and perhaps a few besides of my ancient favorites. That is not said in disparagement of the last, but in admiration of the first. There is, in fact, more thought–more bare brave working of the intellect–in the latter poems, even if we miss something of the high ideality, and the music that goes with it, of the older ones. Only I am always inclined to believe that philosophic thinking, like music, is involved, however occultly, in high ideality of any kind.
You have not a key to the cypher of this at least, and I am so tired that one word seems tumbling over another all the way.
Ever affectionately yours,
ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.
You will let me keep your beautiful ballad and the gods[67] a little longer.
[Footnote 66: This refers to the recent publication of Tennyson’s _Poems_, in two volumes, the first containing a re-issue of poems previously published, while the second was wholly new, and included such poems as the ‘Morte d’Arthur,’ ‘Ulysses,’ and ‘Locksley Hall.’]
[Footnote 67: No doubt Mr. Kenyon’s translation of Schiller’s ‘Gods of Greece,’ which was the occasion of Miss Barrett’s poem ‘The Dead Pan.’]
_To H.S. Boyd_
September 14, 1842.
My very dear Friend,–I have made you wait a long time for the ‘North American Review,’ because when your request came it was no longer within my reach, and because since then I have not been so well as usual from a sweep of the wing of the prevailing epidemic. Now, however, I am _better_ than I was even before the attack, only wishing that it were possible to hook-and-eye on another summer to the hem of the garment of this last sunny one. At the end of such a double summer, to measure things humanly, I might be able to go to see you at Hampstead. Nevertheless, winters and adversities are more fit for us than a constant sun.
I suppose, dear Mr. Boyd, you want only to have this review read to you, and not _written_. Because it isn’t out of laziness that I send the book to you; and Arabel would copy whatever you please willingly, provided you wished it. Keep the book as long as you please. I have put a paper mark and a pencil mark at the page and paragraph where I am taken up. It seems to me that the condemnation of ‘The Seraphim’ is not too hard. The poem wants _unity_.
As to your ‘words of fire’ about Wordsworth, if I had but a cataract at command I would try to quench them. His powers should not be judged of by my extracts or by anybody’s extracts from his last-published volume.[68] Do you remember his grand ode upon Childhood–worth, to my apprehension, just twenty of Dryden’s ‘St. Cecilia’s Day’–his sonnet upon Westminster Bridge, his lyric on a lark, in which the lark’s music swells and exults, and the many noble and glorious passages of his ‘Excursion’? You must not indeed blame me for estimating Wordsworth at _his height_, and on the other side I readily confess to you that he is occasionally, and not unfrequently, heavy and dull, and that Coleridge had an intenser genius. Tell me if you know anything of Tennyson. He has just published two volumes of poetry, one of which is a republication, but both full of inspiration.
Ever my very dear friend’s affectionate and grateful E.B.B.
[Footnote 68: _Poems, chiefly of early and late years, including The Borderers, a Tragedy_ (1842).]
_To Mrs. Martin_
50 Wimpole Street: October 22, 1842.
My dearest Mrs. Martin,–Waiting first for you to write to me, and then waiting that I might write to you cheerfully, has ended by making so long a silence that I am almost ashamed to break it. And perhaps, even if I were not ashamed, you would be angry–perhaps you _are_ angry, and don’t much care now whether or not you ever hear from me again. Still I must write, and I must moreover ask you to write to me again; and I must in particular assure you that I have continued to love you sincerely, notwithstanding all the silence which might seem to say the contrary. What I should like best just now is to have a letter speaking comfortable details of your being comparatively well again; yet I hope on without it that you really are so much better as to be next to quite well. It was with great concern that I heard of the indisposition which hung about you, dearest Mrs. Martin, so long–I who had congratulated myself when I saw you last on the promise of good health in your countenance. May God bless you, and keep you better! And may you take care of yourself, and remember how many love you in the world, from dear Mr. Martin down to–E.B.B.
Well, now I must look around me and consider what there is to tell you. But I have been uneasy in various ways, sometimes by reason and sometimes by fantasy; and even now, although my dear old friend Dr. Scully is something better, he lies, I fear, in a very precarious state, while dearest Miss Mitford’s letters from the deathbed of her father make my heart ache as surely almost as the post comes. There is nothing more various in character, nothing which distinguishes one human being from another more strikingly, than the expression of feeling, the manner in which it influences the outward man. If I were in her circumstances, I should sit paralysed–it would be impossible to me to write or to cry. And she, who loves and feels with the intensity of a nature warm in everything, seems to turn to sympathy by the very instinct of grief, and sits at the deathbed of her last relative, writing there, in letter after letter, every symptom, physical or moral–even to the very words of the raving of a delirium, and those, heart-breaking words! I could not write such letters; but I know she feels as deeply as any mourner in the world can. And all this reminds me of what you once asked me about the inscriptions in Lord Brougham’s villa at Nice. There are probably as many different dialects for the heart as for the tongue, are there not?…
And now you will kindly like to have a word said about myself, and it need not be otherwise than a word to give your kindness pleasure. The long splendid summer, exhausting as the heat was to me sometimes, did me essential good, and left me walking about the room and equal to going downstairs (which I achieved four or five times), and even to going out in the chair, without suffering afterwards. And, best of all, the spitting of blood (I must tell you), which more or less kept by me continually, _stopped quite_ some six weeks ago, and I have thus more reasonable hopes of being really and essentially better than I could have with such a symptom loitering behind accidental improvements. Weak enough, and with a sort of pulse which is not excellent, I certainly remain; but still, if I escape any decided attack this winter–and I am in garrison now–there are expectations of further good for next summer, and I may recover some moderate degree of health and strength again, and be able to _do_ good instead of receiving it only.
I write under the eyes of Wordsworth. Not Wordsworth’s living eyes, although the actual living poet had the infinite kindness to ask Mr. Kenyon twice last summer when he was in London, if he might not come to see me. Mr. Kenyon said ‘No’–I couldn’t have said ‘No’ to Wordsworth, though I had never gone to sleep again afterwards. But this Wordsworth who looks on me now is Wordsworth in a picture. Mr. Haydon the artist, with the utmost kindness, has sent me the portrait he was painting of the great poet–an unfinished portrait–and I am to keep it until he wants to finish it. Such a head! such majesty! and the poet stands musing upon Helvellyn! And all that–poet, Helvellyn, and all–is in my room![69]
Give my kind love to Mr. Martin–_our_ kind love, indeed, to both of you–and believe me, my dearest Mrs. Martin,
Your ever affectionate BA.
Is there any hope for us of you before the winter ends? Do consider.
_To H.S. Boyd_
Monday, October 31, 1842.
My very dear Friend,–I have put off from day to day sending you these volumes, and in the meantime _I have had a letter from the great poet_! Did Arabel tell you that my sonnet on the picture was sent to Mr. Haydon, and that Mr. Haydon sent it to Mr. Wordsworth? The result was that Mr. Wordsworth wrote to me. King John’s barons were never better pleased with their Charta than I am with this letter.[70]
But I won’t tell you any more about it until you have read the poems which I send you. Read first, to put you into good humour, the sonnet written on Westminster Bridge, vol. iii. page 78. Then take from the sixth volume, page 152, the passage beginning ‘Within the soul’ down to page 153 at ‘despair,’ and again at page 155 beginning with
I have seen
A curious child, &c.
down to page 157 to the end of the paragraph. If you admit these passages to be fine poetry, I wish much that you would justify me further by reading, out of the _second_ volume, the two poems called ‘Laodamia’ and ‘Tintern Abbey’ at page 172 and page 161. I will not ask you to read any more; but I dare say you will rush on of your own account, in which case there is a fine ode upon the ‘Power of Sound’ in the same volume. Wordsworth is a philosophical and Christian poet, with depths in his soul to which poor Byron could never reach. Do be candid. Nay, I need not say so, because you always are, as I am,
Your ever affectionate
ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.
[Footnote 69: It was this picture that called forth the sonnet, ‘On a Portrait of Wordsworth by B.R. Haydon’ (_Poetical Works_, iii. 62), alluded to in the next letter.]
[Footnote 70: The following is the letter from Wordsworth which gave such pleasure to Miss Barrett, and which she treasured among her papers for the rest of her life. Two slips of the pen have been corrected between brackets.
‘Rydal Mount: Oct. 26, ’42.
‘Dear Miss Barrett,–Through our common friend Mr. Haydon I have received a sonnet which his portrait of me suggested. I should have thanked you sooner for that effusion of a feeling towards myself, with which I am much gratified, but I have been absent from home and much occupied.
‘The conception of your sonnet is in full accordance with the painter’s intended work, and the expression vigorous; yet the word “ebb,” though I do not myself object to it, nor wish to have it altered, will I fear prove obscure to nine readers out of ten.
“A vision free
And noble, Haydon, hath thine art released.”
Owing to the want of inflections in our language the construction here is obscure. Would it not be a little [better] thus? I was going to write a small change in the order of the words, but I find it would not remove the objection. The verse, as I take it, would be somewhat clearer thus, if you would tolerate the redundant syllable:
“By a vision free
And noble, Haydon, is thine art released.”
I had the gratification of receiving, a good while ago, two copies of a volume of your writing, which I have read with much pleasure, and beg that the thanks which I charged a friend to offer may be repeated [to] you.
‘It grieved me much to hear from Mr. Kenyon that your health is so much deranged. But for that cause I should have presumed to call upon you when I was in London last spring.
‘With every good wish, I remain, dear Miss Barrett, your much obliged
‘WM. WORDSWORTH.’
[Postmark: Ambleside, Oct. 28, 1842.]
It may be added that although Miss Barrett altered the passage criticised by the great poet, she did not accept his amendment. It now runs
‘A noble vision free
Our Haydon’s hand has flung out from the mist.
_To H.S. Boyd_
December 4, 1842.
My very dear Friend,–You will think me in a discontented state of mind when I knit my brows like a ‘sleeve of care’ over your kind praises. But the truth is, I _won’t_ be praised for being liberal in Calvinism and love of Byron. _I_ liberal in commending Byron! Take out my heart and try it! look at it and compare it with yours; and answer and tell me if I do not love and admire Byron more warmly than you yourself do. I suspect it indeed. Why, I am always reproached for my love to Byron. Why, people say to me, ‘_You_, who overpraise Byron!’ Why, when I was a little girl (and, whatever you may think, my tendency is not to cast off my old loves!) I used to think seriously of dressing up like a boy and running away to be Lord Byron’s page. And _I_ to be praised now for being ‘liberal’ in admitting the merit of his poetry! _I_!
As for the Calvinism, I don’t choose to be liberal there either. I don’t call myself a Calvinist. I hang suspended between the two doctrines, and hide my eyes in God’s love from the sights which other people _say_ they see. I believe simply that the saved are saved by grace, and that they shall hereafter know it fully; and that the lost are lost by their choice and free will–by choosing to sin and die; and I believe absolutely that the deepest damned of all the lost will not dare to whisper to the nearest devil that reproach of Martha: ‘If the Lord had been near me, I had not died.’ But of the means of the working of God’s grace, and of the time of the formation of the Divine counsels, I know nothing, guess nothing, and struggle to guess nothing; and my persuasion is that when people talk of what was ordained or approved by God before the foundations of the world, their tendency is almost always towards a confusion of His eternal nature with the human conditions of ours; and to an oblivion of the fact that with _Him_ there can be no after nor before.
At any rate, I do not find it good for myself to examine any more the brickbats of controversy–there is more than enough to think of in truths clearly revealed; more than enough for the exercise of the intellect and affections and adorations. I would rather not suffer myself to be disturbed, and perhaps irritated, where it is not likely that I should ever be informed. And although you tell me that your system of investigation is different from some others, answer me with your accustomed candour, and admit, my very dear friend, that this argument does not depend upon the construction of a Greek sentence or the meaning of a Greek word. Let a certain word[71] be ‘fore-know’ or ‘publicly _favor_,’ room for a stormy controversy yet remains. I went through the Romans with you partially, and wholly by myself, by your desire, and in reference to the controversy, long ago; and I could not then, and cannot now, enter into that view of Taylor and Adam Clarke, and yourself I believe, as to the _Jews and Gentiles_. Neither could I conceive that a particular part of the epistle represents an actual dialogue between a Jew and Gentile, since the form of question and answer appears to me there simply rhetorical. The Apostle Paul was learned in rhetoric; and I think he described so, by a rhetorical and vivacious form, that struggle between the flesh and the spirit common to all Christians; the spirit being triumphant through God in Christ Jesus. These are my impressions. Yours are different. And since we should not probably persuade each other, and since we are both of us fond of and earnest in what we fancy to be the truth, why should we cast away the thousand sympathies we rejoice in, religious and otherwise, for the sake of a fruitless contention? ‘What!’ you would say (by the time we had quarrelled half an hour), ‘can’t you talk without being excited?’ Half an hour afterwards: ‘Pray _do_ lower your voice–it goes through my head!’ In another ten minutes: ‘I could scarcely have believed you to be so obstinate.’ In another: ‘Your prejudices are insurmountable, and your reason most womanly–you are degenerated to the last degree.’ In another–why, _then_ you would turn me and Flush out of the room and so finish the controversy victoriously.
Was I wrong too, dearest Mr. Boyd, in sending the poems to the ‘Athenaeum’? Well, I meant to be right. I fancied that you would rather they were sent; and as your _name_ was not attached, there could be no harm in leaving them to the editor’s disposal. They are not inserted, as I anticipated. The religious character was a sufficient objection–their character of _prayer_. Mr. Dilke begged me once, while I was writing for him, to write the name of God and Jesus Christ as little as I could, because those names did not accord with the secular character of the journal!
Ever your affectionate and grateful
ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.
Tell me how you like the sonnet; but you won’t (I prophesy) like it. Keep the ‘Athenaeum.’
[Footnote 71: The Greek [Greek: progignoskein], used in Romans viii. 29.]
_To H.S. Boyd_
December 24, 1842.
My very dear Friend,–I am afraid that you will infer from my silence that you have affronted me into ill temper by your parody upon my sonnet. Yet ‘lucus a non lucendo’ were a truer derivation. I laughed and thanked you over the parody, and put off writing to you until I had the headache, which forced me to put it off again….
May God bless you, my dear Mr. Boyd. Mr. Savage Landor once said that anybody who could write a parody deserved to be shot; but as he has written one himself since saying so, he has probably changed his mind. Arabel sends her love.
Ever your affectionate and grateful
ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.
_To H.S. Boyd_
January 5, 1842 [1843].
My very dear Friend,–My surprise was inexpressible at your utterance of the name. What! Ossian superior as a poet to Homer! Mr. Boyd saying so! Mr. Boyd treading down the neck of Aeschylus while he praises Ossian! The fact appears to me that anomalous thing among believers–a miracle without an occasion.
I confess I never, never should have guessed the name; not though I had guessed to Doomsday. In the first place I do not believe in Ossian, and having partially examined the testimony (for I don’t pretend to any exact learning about it) I consider him as the poetical _lay figure_ upon which Mr. Macpherson dared to cast his personality. There is a sort of phraseology, nay, an identity of occasional phrases, from the antique–but that these so-called Ossianic poems were ever discovered and translated as they stand in their present form, I believe in no wise. As Dr. Johnson wrote to Macpherson, so I would say, ‘Mr. Macpherson, I thought you an impostor, and think so still.’
It is many years ago since I looked at Ossian, and I never did much delight in him, as that fact proves. Since your letter came I have taken him up again, and have just finished ‘Carthon.’ There are beautiful passages in it, the most beautiful beginning, I think, ‘Desolate is the dwelling of Moina,’ and the next place being filled by that address to the sun you magnify so with praise. But the charm of these things is the _only_ charm of all the poems. There is a sound of wild vague music in a monotone–nothing is articulate, nothing _individual_, nothing various. Take away a few poetical phrases from these poems, and they are colourless and bare. Compare them with the old burning ballads, with a wild heart beating in each. How cold they grow in the comparison! Compare them with Homer’s grand breathing personalities, with Aeschylus’s–nay, but I cannot bear upon my lips or finger the charge of the blasphemy of such comparing, even for religion’s sake….
I had another letter from America a few days since, from an American poet of Boston who is establishing a magazine, and asked for contributions from my pen. The Americans are as good-natured to me as if they took me for the high Radical I am, you know.
You won’t be angry with me for my obliquity (as you will consider it) about Ossian. You know I always talk sincerely to you, and you have not made me afraid of telling you the truth–that is, _my_ truth, the truth of my belief and opinions.
I do not defend much in the ‘Idiot Boy.’ Wordsworth is a great poet, but he does not always write equally.
And that reminds me of a distinction you suggest between Ossian and Homer. _I_ fashion it in this way: Homer sometimes nods, but Ossian _makes his readers nod_.
Ever your affectionate
ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.
Did I tell you that I had been reading through a manuscript translation of the ‘Gorgias’ of Plato, by Mr. Hyman of Oxford, who is a stepson of Mr. Haydon’s the artist? It is an excellent translation with learned notes, but it is _not elegant_. He means to try the public upon it, but, as I have intimated to him, the Christians of the present day are not civilised enough for Plato.
Arabel’s love.
_To H.S. Boyd_
[About the end of January 1843.]
My very dear Friend,–The image you particularly admire in Ossian, I admire with you, although I am not sure that I have not seen it or its like somewhere in a classical poet, Greek or Latin. Perhaps Lord Byron remembered it when in the ‘Siege of Corinth’ he said of his Francesca’s uplifted arm, ‘You might have seen the moon shine through.’ It reminds me also that Maclise the artist, a man of poetical imagination, gives such a transparency to the ghost of Banquo in his picture of Macbeth’s banquet, that we can discern through it the lights of the festival. That is good poetry for a painter, is it not?
I send you the magazines which I have just received from America, and which contain, one of them, ‘The Cry of the Human,’ and the other, four of my sonnets. My correspondent tells me that the ‘Cry’ is considered there one of the most successful of my poems, but you probably will not think so. Tell me exactly what you do think. At page 343 of ‘Graham’s Magazine,’ _Editor’s Table_, is a review of me, which, however extravagant in its appreciation, will give your kindness pleasure. I confess to a good deal of pleasure myself from these American courtesies, expressed not merely in the magazines, but in the newspapers; a heap of which has been sent to me by my correspondent–the ‘New York Tribune,’ ‘The Union,’ ‘The Union Flag,’ &c.–all scattered over with extracts from my books and benignant words about their writer. Among the extracts is the whole of the review of Wordsworth from the London ‘Athenaeum,’ an unconscious compliment, as they do not guess at the authorship, and one which you won’t thank them for. Keep the magazines, as I have duplicates.
Dearest Mr. Boyd, since you admit that I am not prejudiced about Ossian, I take courage to tell you what I am thinking of.
_I am thinking_ (this is said in a whisper, and in confidence–of two kinds), _I am thinking that you don’t admire him quite as much as you did three weeks ago_.
Ever most affectionately yours,
ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.
Arabel not being here, I send her love without asking for it.
_To Mrs. Martin_
January 30, 1843.
My dearest Mrs. Martin,–Thank you for your letter and for dear Mr. Martin’s thought of writing one! Ah! _I_ thought he would not write, but not for the reason you say; it was something more palpable and less romantic! Well, I will not grumble any more about not having my letter, since you are coming, and since you seem, my dear Mrs. Martin, something in better spirits than your note from Southampton bore token of. Madeira is the Promised Land, you know; and you should hope hopefully for your invalid from his pilgrimage there. You should hope with those who hope, my dearest Mrs. Martin….
Our ‘_event_’ just now is a new purchase of a ‘Holy Family,’ supposed to be by Andrea del Sarto. It has displaced the Glover over the chimney-piece in the drawing-room, and dear Stormie and Alfred nearly broke their backs in carrying it upstairs for me to see before the placing. It is probably a fine picture, and I seem to see my way through the dark of my ignorance, to admire the grouping and colouring, whatever doubt as to the expression and divinity may occur otherwise. Well, you will judge. I won’t tell you _how_ I think of it. And you won’t care if I do. There is also a new very pretty landscape piece, and you may imagine the local politics of the arrangement and hanging, with their talk and consultation; while _I_, on the storey higher, have my arranging to manage of my pretty new books and my three hyacinths, and a pot of primroses which dear Mr. Kenyon had the good nature to carry himself through the streets to our door. But all the flowers forswear me, and die either suddenly or gradually as soon as they become aware of the want of fresh air and light in my room. Talking of air and light, what exquisite weather this is! What a summer in winter! It is the fourth day since I have had the fire wrung from me by the heat of temperature, and I sit here _very warm indeed_, notwithstanding that bare grate. Nay, yesterday I had the door thrown open for above an hour, and was warm still! You need not ask, you see, how I am.
Tell me, have you read Mr. Dickens’s ‘America;’ and what is your thought of it like? If I were an American, it would make me rabid, and certain of the free citizens _are_ furious, I understand, while others ‘speak peace and ensue it,’ admire as much of the book as deserves any sort of admiration, and attribute the blameable parts to the prejudices of the party with whom the writer ‘fell in,’ and not to a want of honesty or brotherhood in his own intentions. I admire Mr. Dickens as an imaginative writer, and I love the Americans–I cannot possibly admire or love this book. Does Mr. Martin? Do _you_?
Henrietta would send her love to you if I could hear her voice nearer than I do actually, as she sings to the guitar downstairs. And her love is not the only one to be sent. Give mine to dear Mr. Martin, though he can’t make up his mind to the bore of writing to me. And remember us all, both of you, as we do you.
Dearest Mrs. Martin, your affectionate BA.
_To James Martin_
February 6, 1843.
You make us out, my dear Mr. Martin, to be such perfect parallel lines that I should be half afraid of completing the definition by our never meeting, if it were not for what you say afterwards, of the coming to London, and of promising to come and see Flush. If you should be travelling while I am writing, it was only what happened to me when I wrote not long ago to dearest Mrs. Martin, and everybody in this house cried out against the fatuity of the coincidence. As if I could know that she was travelling, when nobody told me, and I wasn’t a witch! If the same thing happens to-day, believe in the innocence of my ignorance. I shall be consoled if it does–for certain reasons. But for none in the world can I help thanking you for your letter, which gave me so much pleasure from the first sight of the handwriting to the thought of the kindness spent upon me in it, that after all I cannot thank you as I would.
Yet I won’t let you fancy me of such an irrational state of simplicity as not to be fully aware that _you_, with your ‘nature of the fields and forests,’ look down disdainfully and with an inward heat of glorying, upon _me_ who have all my pastime in books–dead and seethed. Perhaps, if it were a little warmer, I might even grant that you are right in your pride. As it is, I grumble feebly to myself something about the definition of _nature_, and how we in the town (which ‘God made’ just as He made your hedges) have _our_ share of nature too; and then I have secret thoughts of the state of the thermometer, and wonder how people can breathe out of doors. In the meantime, Flush, who is a better philosopher, pushes deep into my furs, and goes to sleep. Perhaps I should fear the omen for my correspondent.
Oh yes! That picture in ‘Boz’ is beautiful. For my own part, and by a natural womanly contradiction, I have never cared so much in my life for flowers as since being shut out from gardens–unless, indeed, in the happy days of old when I had a garden of my own, and cut it out into a great Hector of Troy, in relievo, with a high heroic box nose and shoeties of columbine.[72] But that was long ago. Now I count the buds of my primrose with a new kind of interest, and you never saw such a primrose! I begin to believe in Ovid, and look for a metamorphosis. The leaves are turning white and springing up as high as corn. Want of air, and of sun, I suppose. I should be loth to think it–want of friendship to _me_!
Do you know that the royal Boz lives close to us, three doors from Mr. Kenyon in Harley Place? The new numbers appear to me admirable, and full of life and blood–whatever we may say to the thick rouging and extravagance of gesture. There is a beauty, a tenderness, too, in the organ scene, which is worthy of the gilliflowers. But my admiration for ‘Boz’ fell from its ‘sticking place,’ I confess, a good furlong, when I read Victor Hugo; and my creed is, that, _not_ in his tenderness, which is as much his own as his humour, but in his serious powerful Jew-trial scenes, he has followed Hugo closely, and never scarcely looked away from ‘Les Trois Jours d’un Condamne.’
If you should not be on the road, I hope you won’t be very long before you are, and that dearest Mrs. Martin will put off building her greenhouse–you see I believe she _will_ build it–until she gets home again.
How kind of you and of her to have poor old Mrs. Barker at Colwall!
Do believe me, both of you, with love from all of _us_,
Very affectionately yours,
BA.
[Footnote 72: See ‘Hector in the Garden’ (_Poetical Works_, iii. 37).]
_To H.S. Boyd_
February 21, 1843.
Thank you, my very dear friend, I am as well as the east wind will suffer me to be; and _that_, indeed, is not very well, my heart being fuller of all manner of evil than is necessary to its humanity. But the wind is changed, and the frost is gone, and it is not quite out of my fancy yet that I may see you next summer. _You and summer are not out of the question yet_. Therefore, you see, I cannot be very deep in tribulation. But you may consider it a bad symptom that I have just finished a poem of some five hundred lines in stanzas, called ‘The Lost Bower,'[73] and about nothing at all in particular.
As to Arabel, she is not an icicle. There are flowers which blow in the frost–when we brambles are brown with their inward death–and she is of them, dear thing. _You_ are not a bramble, though, and I hope that when you talk of ‘feeling the cold,’ you mean simply to refer to your sensation, and not to your health. Remember also, dearest Mr. Boyd, what a glorious winter we have had. Take away the last ten days and a few besides, and call the whole summer rather than winter. Ought we to complain, really? Really, no.
I venture another prophecy upon the shoulders of the ast, though my hand shakes so that nobody will read it.
_You can’t abide my ‘Cry of the Human,’ and four sonnets_. They have none of them found favor in your eyes.
In or out of favor,
Ever your affectionate E.B.B.
Do you think that next summer you _might, could_, or _would_ walk across the park to see me–supposing always that I fail in my aspiration to go and see you? I only ask by way of _hypothesis_. Consider and revolve it so. We live on the verge of the town rather than in it, and our noises are cousins to silence; and you should pass into a room where the silence is most absolute. Flush’s breathing is my loudest sound, and then the watch’s tickings, and then my own heart when it beats too turbulently. Judge of the quiet and the solitude!
[Footnote 73: _Poetical Works_, iii. 105.]
_To H.S. Boyd_
April 19, 1843.
My very dear Friend,–The earth turns round, to be sure, and we turn with it, but I never anticipated the day and the hour for _you_ to turn round and be guilty of high treason to our Greeks. I cry ‘_Ai_! _ai_!’ as if I were a chorus, and all vainly. For, you see, arguing about it will only convince you of my obstinacy, and not a bit of Homer’s supremacy. Ossian has wrapt you in a cloud, a fog, a true Scotch mist. You have caught cold in the critical faculty, perhaps. At any rate, I can’t see a bit more of your reasonableness than I can see of Fingal. _Sic transit_! Homer like the darkened half of the moon in eclipse! You have spoilt for me now the finest image in your Ossian-Macpherson.
My dearest Mr. Boyd, you will find as few believers in the genuineness of these volumes among the most accomplished antiquarians in poetry as in the genuineness of Chatterton’s Rowley, and of Ireland’s Shakespeare. The latter impostures boasted of disciples in the first instance, but the discipleship perished by degrees, and the place thereof, during this present 1843, knows it no more. So has it been with the belief in Macpherson’s Ossian. Of those who believed in the poems at the first sight of them, who kept his creed to the end? And speaking so, I speak of Macpherson’s contemporaries whom you respect.
I do not consider Walter Scott a great poet, but he was highly accomplished in matters of poetical antiquarianism, and is certainly citable as an authority on this question.
Try not to be displeased with me. I cannot conceal from you that my astonishment is profound and unutterable at your new religion–your new faith in this pseud-Ossian–and your desecration, in his service, of the old Hellenic altars. And by the way, my own figure reminds me to inquire of you whether you are not sometimes struck with a _want_ in him–a want very grave in poetry, and very strange in antique poetry–the want of devotional feeling and conscience of God. Observe, that all antique poets rejoice greatly and abundantly in their divine mythology; and that if this Ossian be both antique and godless, he is an exception, a discrepancy, a monster in the history of letters and experience of humanity. As such I leave him.
Oh, how angry you will be with me. But you seemed tolerably prepared in your last letter for my being in a passion…. Ever affectionately yours,
ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.
Why should I be angry with Flush? _He_ does not believe in Ossian. Oh, I assure you he doesn’t.
The following letter was called forth by a criticism of Mr. Kenyon’s on Miss Barrett’s poem, _The Dead Pan_, which he had seen in manuscript; but it also meets some criticisms which others had made upon her last volume (see above, p. 65).
_To John Kenyan_
Wimpole Street: March 25, 1843.
My very dear Cousin,–Your kindness having touched me much, and your good opinion, whether literary or otherwise, being of great price to me, it is even with tears in my eyes that I begin to write to you upon a difference between us. And what am I to say? To admit, of course, in the first place, the injuriousness to the ‘popularity,’ of the scriptural tone. But am I to sacrifice a principle to popularity? Would you advise me to do so? Should I be more worthy of your kindness by doing so? and could you (apart from the kindness) call my refusal to do so either perverseness or obstinacy? Even if you could, I hope you will try a little to be patient with me, and to forgive, at least, what you find it impossible to approve.
My dear cousin, if you had not reminded me of Wordsworth’s exclamation–
I would rather be
A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn–
and if he had never made it, I do think that its significance would have occurred to me, by a sort of instinct, in connection with this discussion. Certainly _I_ would rather be a pagan whose religion was actual, earnest, continual–for week days, work days, and song days–than I would be a _Christian_ who, from whatever motive, shrank from hearing or uttering the name of Christ out of a ‘church.’ I am no fanatic, but I like truth and earnestness in all things, and I cannot choose but believe that such a Christian shows but ill beside such a pagan. What pagan poet ever thought of casting his gods out of his poetry? In what pagan poem do they not shine and thunder? And if _I_–to approach the point in question–if _I_, writing a poem the end of which is the extolment of what I consider to be Christian truth over the pagan myths shrank even _there_ from naming the name of my God lest it should not meet the sympathies of some readers, or lest it should offend the delicacies of other readers, or lest, generally, it should be unfit for the purposes of poetry in what more forcible manner than by that act (I appeal to Philip against Philip) can I controvert my own poem, or secure to myself and my argument a logical and unanswerable shame? If Christ’s name is improperly spoken in that poem, then indeed is Schiller right, and the true gods of poetry are to be sighed for mournfully. For be sure that _Burns_ was right, and that a poet without devotion is below his own order, and that poetry without religion will gradually lose its elevation. And then, my dear friend, we do not live among dreams. The Christian religion is true or it is not, and if it is true it offers the highest and purest objects of contemplation. And the poetical faculty, which expresses the highest moods of the mind, passes naturally to the highest objects. Who can separate these things? Did Dante? Did Tasso? Did Petrarch? Did Calderon? Did Chaucer? Did the poets of our best British days? Did any one of these shrink from speaking out Divine names when the occasion came? Chaucer, with all his jubilee of spirit and resounding laughter, had the name of Jesus Christ and God as frequently to familiarity on his lips as a child has its father’s name. You say ‘our religion is not vital–not week-day–enough.’ Forgive me, but _that_ is a confession of a wrong, not an argument. And if a poet be a poet, it is his business to work for the elevation and purification of the public mind, rather than for his own popularity! while if he be not a poet, no sacrifice of self-respect will make amends for a defective faculty, nor _ought_ to make amends.
My conviction is that the _poetry of Christianity_ will one day be developed greatly and nobly, and that in the meantime we are wrong, poetically as morally, in desiring to restrain it. No, I never felt repelled by any Christian phraseology in Cowper–although he is not a favorite poet of mine from other causes–nor in Southey, nor even in James Montgomery, nor in Wordsworth where he writes ‘ecclesiastically,’ nor in Christopher North, nor in Chateaubriand, nor in Lamartine.
It is but two days ago since I had a letter–and not from a fanatic–to reproach my poetry for not being Christian enough, and this is not the first instance, nor the second, of my receiving such a reproach. I tell you this to open to you the possibility of another side to the question, which makes, you see, a triangle of it!
Can you bear with such a long answer to your letter, and forbear calling it a ‘preachment’? There may be such a thing as an awkward and untimely introduction of religion, I know, and I have possibly been occasionally guilty in this way. But for _my principle_ I must contend, for it is a poetical principle _and more_, and an entire sincerity in respect to it is what I owe to you and to myself. Try to forgive me, dear Mr. Kenyon. I would propitiate your indulgence for me by a libation of your own eau de Cologne poured out at your feet! It is excellent eau de Cologne, and you are very kind to me, but, notwithstanding all, there is a foreboding within me that my ‘conventicleisms’ will be inodorous in your nostrils.
[_Incomplete_.]
_To John Kenyon_
Tuesday [about March 1843].
My very dear Cousin,–I have read your letter again and again, and feel your kindness fully and earnestly. You have advised me about the poem,[74] entering into the questions referring to it with the warmth rather of the author of it than the critic of it, and this I am sensible of as absolutely as anyone can be. At the same time, I have a strong perception rather than opinion about the poem, and also, if you would not think it too serious a word to use in such a place, I have a _conscience_ about it. It was not written in a desultory fragmentary way, the last stanzas thrown in, as they might be thrown out, but with a _design_, which leans its whole burden on the last stanzas. In fact, the last stanzas were in my mind to say, and all the others presented the mere avenue to the end of saying them. Therefore I cannot throw them out–I cannot yield to the temptation even of pleasing _you_ by doing so; I make a compromise with myself, and _do not throw them out, and do not print the poem_. Now say nothing against this, my dear cousin, because I am obstinate, as you know, as you have good evidence for knowing. I _will not_ either alter or print it. Then you have your manuscript copy, which you can cut into any shape you please as long as you keep it out of print; and seeing that the poem really does belong to you, having had its origin in your paraphrase of Schiller’s stanzas, I see a great deal of poetical justice in the manuscript copyright remaining in your hands. For the rest I shall have quite enough to print and to be responsible for without it, and I am quite satisfied to let it be silent for a few years until either I or you (as may be the case even with _me_!) shall have revised our judgments in relation to it.
This being settled, you must suffer me to explain (for mere personal reasons, and not for the good of the poem) that no mortal priest (of St. Peter’s or otherwise) is referred to in a particular stanza, but the Saviour Himself. Who is ‘the High Priest of our profession,’ and the only ‘priest’ recognised in the New Testament. In the same way the altar candles are altogether spiritual, or they could not be supposed, even by the most amazing poetical exaggeration, to ‘light the earth and skies.’ I explain this, only that I may not appear to you to have compromised the principle of the poem, by compromising any truth (such in my eyes) for the sake of a poetical effect.
And now I will not say any more. I know that you will be inclined to cry, ‘Print it in any case,’ but I will entreat of your kindness, which I have so much right to trust in while entreating, _not to say one such word. Be kind, and let me follow my own way silently_. I have not, indeed, like a spoilt child in a fret, thrown the poem up because I would not alter it, though you have done much to spoil me. I act advisedly, and have made up my mind as to what is the wisest and best thing to do, and personally the pleasantest to myself, after a good deal of serious reflection. ‘Pan is dead,’ and so best, for the present at least.
I shall take your advice about the preface in every respect, and thanks for the letter and Taylor’s memoirs.
Miss Mitford talks of coming to town for a day, and of bringing Flush with her, as soon as the weather settles, and to-day looks so like it that I have mused this morning on the possibility of breaking my prison doors and getting into the next room. Only there is a forbidding north wind, they say.
Don’t be vexed with me, dear Mr. Kenyon. You know there are obstinacies in the world as well as mortalities, and thereto appertaining. And then you will perceive through all mine, that it is difficult for me to act against your judgment so far as to put my own tenacity into print.
Ever gratefully and affectionately yours, E.B.B.
[Footnote 74: ‘The Dead Pan’ (_Poetical Works_, iii. 280).]
It is to the honour of America that it recognised from the first the genius of Miss Barrett; and for a large part of her life some of the closest of her personal and literary connections were with Americans. The same is true in both respects of Robert Browning. As appears from some letters printed farther on in these volumes, at a time when the sale of his poems in England was almost infinitesimal, they were known and highly prized in the United States. Expressions of Mrs. Browning’s sympathy with America and of gratitude for the kindly feelings of Americans recur frequently in the letters, and it is probable that there are still extant in the States many letters written to friends and correspondents there. Only three or four such have been made available for the present collection; and of these the first follows here in its place in the chronological sequence. It was written to Mr. Cornelius Mathews, then editor of ‘Graham’s Magazine,’ who had invited Miss Barrett to send contributions to his periodical. The warm expression in it of sympathy with the poetry of Robert Browning, whom she did not yet know personally, is especially interesting to readers of this later day, who, like the spectators at a Greek tragedy, watch the development of a drama of which the _denouement_ is already known to them.
_To Cornelius Mathews_
50 Wimpole Street: April 28, 1843.
My dear Mr. Mathews,–In replying to your kind letter I send some more verse for Graham’s, praying such demi-semi-gods as preside over contributors to magazines that I may not appear over-loquacious to my editor. Of course it is not intended to thrust three or four poems into one number. My pluralities go to you simply to ‘bide your time,’ and be used one by one as the opportunity is presented. In the meanwhile you have received, I hope, a short letter written to explain my unwillingness to apply, as you desired me at first, to Wiley and Putnam–an unwillingness justified by what you told me afterwards. I did not apply, nor have I applied, and I would rather not apply at all. Perhaps I shall hear from them presently. The pamphlet on International Copyright is welcome at a distance, but it has not come near me yet; and for all your kindness in relation to the prospective gift of your works I thank you again and earnestly. You are kind to me in many ways, and I would willingly know as much of your intellectual habits as you teach me of your genial feelings. This ‘Pathfinder’ (what an excellent name for an American journal!) I also owe to you, with the summing up of your performances in it, and with a notice of Mr. Browning’s ‘Blot on the Scutcheon,’ which would make one poet furious (the ‘infelix Talfourd’) and another a little melancholy–namely, Mr. Browning himself. There is truth on both sides, but it seems to me hard truth on Browning. I do assure you I never saw him in my life–do not know him even by correspondence–and yet, whether through fellow-feeling for Eleusinian mysteries, or whether through the more generous motive of appreciation of his powers, I am very sensitive to the thousand and one stripes with which the assembly of critics doth expound its vocation over him, and the ‘Athenaeum,’ for instance, made me quite cross and misanthropical last week.[75] The truth is–and the world should know the truth–it is easier to find a more faultless writer than a poet of equal genius. Don’t let us fall into the category of the sons of Noah. Noah was once drunk, indeed, but once he built the ark. Talking of poets, would your ‘Graham’s Miscellany’ care at all to have occasional poetical contributions from Mr. Horne? I am in correspondence with him, and I think I could manage an arrangement upon the same terms as my engagement rests on, if you please and your friends please, that is, and without formality, if it should give you any pleasure. He is a writer of great power, I think. And this reminds me that you may be looking all the while for the ‘Athenaeum’s’ reply to your friend’s proposition–of which I lost no time in apprising the editor, Mr. Dilke, and here are some of his words: ‘An American friend who had been long in England, and often conversed with me on the subject, resolved on his return to establish such a correspondence. In all things worth knowing–all reviews of good books’ (which ‘are published first or simultaneously,’ says Mr. Dilke, ‘in London’), ‘he was anticipated, and after some months he was driven of necessity to geological surveys, centenary celebrations, progress of railroads, manufactures, &c., and thus the prospect was abandoned altogether.’ Having made this experiment, Mr. Dilke is unwilling to risk another. Neither must we blame him for the reserve. When the international copyright shall at once protect the national _meum_ and _tuum_ in literature and give it additional fullness and value, we shall cease to say insolently to you that what we want of your books we will get without your help, but as it is, the Mr. Dilkes of us have nothing much more courteous to do. I wish I could have been of any use to your friend–I have done what I could. In regard to critical papers of mine, I would willingly give myself up to you, seeing your good nature; but it is the truth that I never published any prose papers at all except the series on the Greek Christian poets and the other series on the English poets in the ‘Athenaeum’ of last year, and both of which you have probably seen. Afterwards I threw up my brief and went back to my poetry, in which I feel that I must do whatever I am equal to doing at all. That life is short and art long appears to us more true than usual when we lie all day long on a sofa and are as frightened of the east wind as if it were a tiger. Life is not only short, but uncertain, and art is not only long, but absorbing. What have I to do with writing ‘_scandal_’ (as Mr. Jones would say) upon my neighbour’s work, when I have not finished my own? So I threw up my brief into Mr. Dilke’s hands, and went back to my verses. Whenever I print another volume you shall have it, if Messrs. Wiley and Putnam will convey it to you. How can I send you, by the way, anything I may have to send you? Why will you not, as a nation, embrace our great penny post scheme, and hold our envelopes in all acceptation? You do not know–cannot guess–what a wonderful liberty our Rowland Hill has given to British spirits, and how we ‘_flash_ a thought’ instead of ‘wafting’ it from our extreme south to our extreme north, paying ‘a penny for our thought’ and for the electricity included. I recommend you our penny postage as the most successful revolution since the ‘glorious three days’ of Paris.
And so, you made merry with my scorn of my ‘Prometheus.’ Believe me–believe me absolutely–I did not strike that others might spare, but from an earnest remorse. When you know me better, you will know, I hope, that I am _true_, whether right or wrong, and you know already that I am right in this thing, the only merit of the translation being its closeness. Can I be of any use to you, dear Mr. Mathews? When I can, make use of me. You surprise and disappoint me in your sketch of the Boston poet, for the letter he wrote to me struck me as frank and honest. I wonder if he made any use of the verses I sent him; and I wonder what I sent him–for I never made a note of it, through negligence, and have quite forgotten. Are you acquainted with Mrs. Sigourney? She has offended us much by her exposition of Mrs. Southey’s letter, and I must say not without cause. I rejoice in the progress of ‘Wakondah,’ wishing the influences of mountain and river to be great over him and in him. And so I will say the ‘God bless you’ your kindness cares to hear, and remain,
Sincerely and thankfully yours,
ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.
_(Endorsed in another hand)_
E.B. Barrett, London, received May 12, 1843, 4 poems, previously furnished to _Graham’s Magazine_, $50.
[Footnote 75: The _Athenaeum_ of April 22 contained a review of Browning’s ‘Dramatic Lyrics,’ charging him with taking pleasure in being enigmatical, and declaring this to be a sign of weakness, not strength. It spoke of many of the pieces composing the volume as being rather fragments and sketches than having any right to independent existence.]
_To John Kenyan_
May 1, 1843
My dear Cousin,–Here is my copyright for you, and you will see that I have put ‘word’ instead of ‘sound,’ as certainly the proper ‘word.’ Do let me thank you once more for all the trouble and interest you have taken with me and in me. Observe besides that I have altered the title according to your unconscious suggestion, and made it ‘The Dead Pan,’ which is a far better name, I think, than the repetition of the _refrain_.
But I spoil my exemplary docility so far, by confessing that I don’t like ‘scornful children’ half–no, not half so well as my ‘railing children,’ although, to be sure, you proved to me that the last was nigh upon nonsense. You proved it–that is, you almost proved it, for don’t we say–at least, _mightn’t_ we say–‘the thunder was silent’? ‘_thunder_’ involving the idea of noise, as much as ‘railing children’ do. Consider this–I give it up to you.[76]
I am ashamed to have kept Carlyle so long, but I quite failed in trying to read him at my “usual pace–he _won’t_ be read quick. After all, and full of beauty and truth as that book is, and strongly as it takes hold of my sympathies, there is nothing new in it–not even a new Carlyleism, which I do not say by way of blaming the book, because the author of it might use words like the apostle’s: ‘To write the same things unto you, to me indeed is not grievous, and to you it is safe.’ The world being blind and deaf and rather stupid, requires a reiteration of certain uncongenial truths….
Thank you for the address.
Ever affectionately yours,
E.B.B.
I observe that the _most questionable rhymes_ are not objected to by Mr. Merivale; also–but this letter is too long already.
[Footnote 76: Mr. Kenyon’s view evidently prevailed, for stanza 19 now has ‘scornful children.’]
_To Mrs. Martin_
May 3, 1843.
My dearest Mrs. Martin,–If _you_ promised (which you did), _I_ ought to have promised–and therefore we may ask each other’s pardon….
How is the dog? and how does dear Mr. Martin find himself in Arcadia? Do we all stand in his recollection like a species of fog, or a concentrated essence of brick wall? How I wish–and since I said it aloud to you I have often wished it over in a whisper–that you would put away your romance, or cut it in two, and spend six months of the year in London with us! Miss Mitford believes that wishes, if wished hard enough, realise themselves, but my experience has taught me a less cheerful creed. Only if wishes _do_ realise themselves!
Miss Mitford is at Bath, where she has spent one week and is about to spend two, and then goes on her way into Devonshire. She amused me so the other day by desiring me to look at the date of Mr. Landor’s poems in their first edition, because she was sure that it must be fifty years since, and she finds him at this 1843, the very Lothario of Bath, enchanting the wives, making jealous the husbands, and ‘enjoying,’ altogether, the worst of reputations. I suggested that if she proved him to be seventy-five, as long as he proved himself enchanting, it would do no manner of good in the way of practical ethics; and that, besides, for her to travel round the world to investigate gentlemen’s ages was invidious, and might be alarming as to the safe inscrutability of ladies’ ages. She is delighted with the _scenery of Bath_, which certainly, take it altogether, marble and mountains, is the most beautiful town I ever looked upon. Cheltenham, I think, is a mere commonplace to it, although the avenues are beautiful, to be sure….
Mrs. Southey complains that she has lost half her income by her marriage, and her friend Mr. Landor is anxious to persuade, by the means of intermediate friends, Sir Robert Peel to grant her a pension. She is said to be in London now, and has at least left Keswick for ever. It is not likely that Wordsworth should come here this year, which I am sorry for now, although I should certainly be sorry if he did come. A happy state of contradiction, not confined either to that particular movement or no-movement, inasmuch as I was gratified by his sending me the poem you saw, and yet read it with such extreme pain as to incapacitate me from judging of it. Such stuff we are made of!
This is a long letter–and you are tired, I feel by instinct!
May God bless you, my dearest Mrs. Martin. Give my love to Mr. Martin, and think of me as
Your very affectionate,
BA.
Henry and Daisy have been to see the _lying in state_, as lying stark and dead is called whimsically, of the Duke of Sussex. It was a fine sight, they say.
_To H.S. Boyd_
May 9, 1843 [postmark].
My very dear Friend,–I thank you much for the copies of your ‘Anti-Puseyistic Pugilism.’ The papers reached my hands quite safely and so missed setting the world on fire; and I shall be as wary of them evermore (be sure) as if they were gunpowder. Pray send them to Mary Hunter. Why not? Why should you think that I was likely to ‘object’ to your doing so? She will laugh. _I_ laughed, albeit in no smiling mood; for I have been transmigrating from one room to another, and your packet found me half tired and half excited, and _whole_ grave. But I could not choose but laugh at your Oxford charge; and when I had counted your great guns and javelin points and other military appurtenances of the Punic war, I said to myself–or to Flush, ‘Well, Mr. Boyd will soon be back again with the dissenters.’ Upon which I think Flush said, ‘That’s a comfort.’
Mary’s direction is, 111 London Road, Brighton. You ought to send the verses to her yourself, if you mean to please her entirely: and I cannot agree with you that there is the slightest danger in sending them by the post. Letters are never opened, unless you tempt the flesh by putting sovereigns, or shillings, or other metallic substances inside the envelope; and if the devil entered into me causing me to write a libel against the Queen, I would send it by the post fearlessly from John o’ Groat’s to Land’s End inclusive.
One of your best puns, if not the best,
Hatching succession apostolical,
With other falsehoods diabolical,
lies in an octosyllabic couplet; and what business has _that_ in your heroic libel?
The ‘pearl’ of maidens sends her love to you.
Your very affectionate
ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.
_To H.S. Boyd_
May 14, 1843.
My very dear Friend,–I hear with wonder from Arabel of your repudiation of my word ‘octosyllabic’ for the two lines in your controversial poem. Certainly, if you count the syllables on your fingers, there are ten syllables in each line: of _that_ I am perfectly aware; but the lines are none the less belonging to the species of versification called octosyllabic. Do you not observe, my dearest Mr. Boyd, that the final accent and rhyme fall on the eighth syllable instead of the tenth, and that _that_ single circumstance determines the class of verse–that they are in fact octosyllabic verses with triple rhymes?
Hatching succession apostolical,
With other falsehoods diabolical.
Pope has double rhymes in his heroic verses, but how does he manage them? Why, he admits eleven syllables, throwing the final accent and rhyme on the tenth, thus:
Worth makes the man, and want of it the f_e_llow, The rest is nought but leather and prun_e_lla.
Again, if there is a double rhyme to an octosyllabic verse, there are always _nine_ syllables in that verse, the final accent and rhyme falling on the eighth syllable, thus:
Compound for sins that we’re incl_i_ned to, By damning those we have no m_i_nd to.
(‘Hudibras.’)
Again, if there is a triple rhyme to an octosyllabic verse (precisely the present case) there must always be ten syllables in that verse, the final accent and rhyme falling on the eighth syllable; thus from ‘Hudibras’ again:
Then in their robes the penit_e_ntials Are straight presented with cred_e_ntials. Remember how in arms and p_o_litics,
We still have worsted all your h_o_ly tricks.
You will admit that these last couplets are precisely of the same structure as yours, and certainly they are octosyllabics, and made use of by Butler in an octosyllabic poem, whereas yours, to be rendered of the heroic structure, should run thus:
Hatching at ease succession apostolical, With many other falsehoods diabolical.
I have written a good deal about an oversight on your part of little consequence; but as you charged me with a mistake made in cold blood and under corrupt influences from Lake-mists, why I was determined to make the matter clear to you. And as to the _influences_, if I were guilty of this mistake, or of a thousand mistakes, Wordsworth would not be guilty _in_ me. I think of him now, exactly as I thought of him during the first years of my friendship for you, only with _an equal_ admiration. He was a great poet to me always, and always, while I have a soul for poetry, will be so; yet I said, and say in an under-voice, but steadfastly, that Coleridge was the grander genius. There is scarcely anything newer in my estimation of Wordsworth than in the colour of my eyes!
Perhaps I was wrong in saying ‘_a pun._’ But I thought I apprehended a double sense in your application of the term ‘Apostolical succession’ to Oxford’s ‘breeding’ and ‘hatching,’ words which imply succession in a way unecclesiastical.
After all which quarrelling, I am delighted to have to talk of your coming nearer to me–within reach–almost within my reach. Now if I am able to go in a carriage at all this summer, it will be hard but that I manage to get across the park and serenade you in Greek under your window.
Your ever affectionate
ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.
_To H.S. Boyd_
May 18, 1843.
My very dear Friend,–Yes, you have surprised me!
I always have thought of you, and I always think and say, that you are truthful and candid in a supreme degree, and therefore it is not your candour about Wordsworth which surprises me.
He had the kindness to send me the poem upon Grace Darling when it first appeared; and with a curious mixture of feelings (for I was much gratified by his attention in sending it) I yet read it with _so_ much pain from the nature of the subject, that my judgment was scarcely free to consider the poetry–I could scarcely determine to myself what I _thought_ of it from feeling too much.
_But_ I do confess to you, my dear friend, that I suspect–through the mist of my sensations–the poem in question to be very inferior to his former poems; I confess that the impression left on my mind is, of its decided inferiority, and I have heard that the poet’s friends and critics (all except _one_) are mourning over its appearance; sighing inwardly, ‘Wordsworth is old.’
One thing is clear to me, however, and over _that_ I rejoice and triumph greatly. If you can esteem this poem of ‘Grace Darling,’ you must be susceptible to the grandeur and beauty of the poems which preceded it; and the cause of your past reluctance to recognise the poet’s power must be, as I have always suspected, from your having given a very partial attention and consideration to his poetry. You were partial in your attention _I_, perhaps, was injudicious in my extracts; but with your truth and his genius, I cannot doubt but that the time will come for your mutual amity. Oh that I could stand as a herald of peace, with my wool-twisted fillet! I do not understand the Greek metres as well as you do, but I understand Wordsworth’s genius better, and do you forgive that it should console me.
I will ask about his collegian extraction. Such a question never occurred to me. Apollo taught him under the laurels, while all the Muses looked through the boughs.
Your ever affectionate
ELIZABETH B. BARRETT,
Oh, yes, it delights me that you should be nearer. Of course you know that Wordsworth is Laureate.[77]
[Footnote 77: Wordsworth was nominated Poet Laureate after the death of Southey in March 1843.]
_To John Kenyan_
May 19, 1843,
Thank you, my dear cousin, for all your kindness to me. There is ivy enough for a thyrsus, and I almost feel ready to enact a sort of Bacchus triumphalis ‘for jollitie,’ as I see it already planted, and looking in at me through the window. I never thought to see such a sight as _that_ in my London room, and am overwhelmed with my own glory.
And then Mr. Browning’s note! Unless you say ‘nay’ to me, I shall keep this note, which has pleased me so much, yet not more than it ought. _Now_, I forgive Mr. Merivale for his hard thoughts of my easy rhymes. But all this pleasure, my dear Mr. Kenyon, I owe to _you_, and shall remember that I do.
Ever affectionately yours,
E.B.B.
_To Mrs. Martin_
May 26, 1843.
… I thank you for your part in the gaining of my bed, dearest Mrs. Martin, most earnestly; and am quite ready to believe that it was gained by _wishdom_, which believing is wisdom! No, you would certainly never recognise my prison if you were to see it. The bed, like a sofa and no Bed; the large table placed out in the room, towards the wardrobe end of it; the sofa rolled where a sofa should be rolled–opposite the arm-chair: the drawers crowned with a coronal of shelves fashioned by Sette and Co. (of papered deal and crimson merino) to carry my books; the washing table opposite turned into a cabinet with another coronal of shelves; and Chaucer’s and Homer’s busts in guard over these two departments of English and Greek poetry; three more busts consecrating the wardrobe which there was no annihilating; and the window–oh, I must take a new paragraph for the window, I am out of breath.
In the window is fixed a deep box full of soil, where are _springing up_ my scarlet runners, nasturtiums, and convolvuluses, although they were disturbed a few days ago by the revolutionary insertion among them of a great ivy root with trailing branches so long and wide that the top tendrils are fastened to Henrietta’s window of the higher storey, while the lower ones cover all my panes. It is Mr. Kenyon’s gift. He makes the like to flourish out of mere flowerpots, and embower his balconies and windows, and why shouldn’t this flourish with me? But certainly–there is no shutting my eyes to the fact that it does droop a little. Papa prophesies hard things against it every morning, ‘Why, Ba, it looks worse and worse,’ and everybody preaches despondency. I, however, persist in being sanguine, looking out for new shoots, and making a sure pleasure in the meanwhile by listening to the sound of the leaves against the pane, as the wind lifts them and lets them fall. Well, what do you think of my ivy? Ask Mr. Martin, if he isn’t jealous already.
Have you read ‘The Neighbours,’ Mary Howitt’s translation of Frederica Bremer’s Swedish? Yes, perhaps. Have you read ‘The Home,'[1] fresh from the same springs? _Do_, if you have not. It has not only charmed me, but made me happier and better: it is fuller of Christianity than the most orthodox controversy in Christendom; and represents to my perception or imagination a perfect and beautiful embodiment of Christian outward life from the inward, purely and tenderly. At the same time, I should tell you that Sette says, ‘I might have liked it ten years ago, but it is too young and silly to give me any pleasure now.’ For _me_, however, it is not too young, and perhaps it won’t be for you and Mr. Martin. As to Sette, he is among the patriarchs, to say nothing of the lawyers–and there we leave him….
Ever your affectionate
BA.
_To John Kenyan_
50 Wimpole Street:
Wednesday, or is it Thursday? [summer 1843].
My dear Cousin,–… I send you my friend Mr. Horne’s new epic,[78] and beg you, if you have an opportunity, to drop it at Mr. Eagles’ feet, so that he may pick it up and look at it. I have not gone through it (I have another copy), but it appears to me to be full of fine things. As to the author’s fantasy of selling it for a farthing, I do not enter into the secret of it–unless, indeed, he should intend a sarcasm on the age’s generous patronage of poetry, which is possible.
[Footnote 78: _Orion_, the early editions of which were sold at a farthing, in accordance with a fancy of the author. Miss Barrett reviewed it in the _Athenaum_ (July 1843).]
_To John Kenyan_
June 30, 1843.
Thank you, my dear Mr. Kenyon, for the Camden Society books, and also for these which I return; and also for the hope of seeing you, which I kept through yesterday. I honor Mrs. Coleridge for the readiness of reasoning and integrity in reasoning, for the learning, energy, and impartiality which she has brought to her purpose, and I agree with her in many of her objects; and disagree, by opposing her opponents with a fuller front than she is always inclined to do. In truth, I can never see anything in these sacramental ordinances except a prospective sign in one (Baptism), and a memorial sign in the other, the Lord’s Supper, and could not recognise either under any modification as a peculiar instrument of grace, mystery, or the like. The tendencies we have towards making mysteries of God’s simplicities are as marked and sure as our missing the actual mystery upon occasion. God’s love is the true mystery, and the sacraments are only too simple for us to understand. So you see I have read the book in spite of prophecies. After all I should like to cut it in two–it would be better for being shorter–and it might be clearer also. There is, in fact, some dullness and perplexity–a few passages which are, to my impression, contradictory of the general purpose–something which is not generous, about nonconformity–and what I cannot help considering a superfluous tenderness for Puseyism. Moreover she is certainly wrong in imagining that the ante-Nicene fathers did not as a body teach regeneration by baptism–even Gregory Nazianzen, the most spiritual of many, did, and in the fourth century. But, after all, as a work of theological controversy it is very un-bitter and well-poised, gentle, and modest, and as the work of a woman _you_ must admire it and _we_ be proud of it–_that_ remains certain at last.
Poor Mr. Haydon! I am so sorry for his reverse in the cartoons.[79] It is a thunderbolt to him. I wonder, in the pauses of my regret, whether Mr. Selous is _your_ friend–whether ‘Boadicea visiting the Druids,’ suggested by you, I think, as a subject, is this victorious ‘Boadicea’ down for a hundred pound prize? You will tell me when you come.
I have just heard an uncertain rumour of the arrival of your brother. If it is not all air, I congratulate you heartily upon a happiness only not past my appreciation.
Ever affectionately yours,
E.B.B.
I send the copy of ‘Orion’ for _yourself_, which you asked for. It is in the fourth edition.
[Footnote 79: This refers to the competition for the cartoons to be painted in the Houses of Parliament, in which Haydon was unsuccessful. The disappointment was the greater, inasmuch as the scheme for decorating the building with historical pictures was mainly due to his initiative.]
_To Mrs. Martin_
July 8, 1843.
Thank you, my dearest Mrs. Martin, for your kind sign of interest in the questioning note, although I will not praise the _stenography_ of it. I shall be as brief to-day as you, not quite out of revenge, but because I have been writing to George and am the less prone to activities from having caught cold in an inscrutable manner, and being stiff and sore from head to foot and inclined to be a little feverish and irritable of nerves. No, it is not of the slightest consequence; I tell you the truth. But I would have written to you the day before yesterday if it had not been for this something between cramp and rheumatism, which was rather unbearable at first, but yesterday was better, and is to-day better than better, and to-morrow will leave me quite well, if I may prophesy. I only mention it lest you should have upbraided me for not answering your note in a moment, as it deserved to be answered. So don’t put any nonsense into Georgie’s head–forgive me for beseeching you! I have been very well–downstairs seven or eight times; lying on the floor in Papa’s room; meditating _the chair_, which would have amounted to more than a meditation except for this little contrariety. In a day or two more, if this cool warmth perseveres in serving me, and no Ariel refills me ‘with aches,’ I shall fulfil your kind wishes perhaps and be out–and so, no more about me!…
Oh, I do believe you think me a Cockney–a metropolitan barbarian! But I persist in seeing no merit and no superior innocence in being shut up even in precincts of rose-trees, away from those great sources of human sympathy and occasions of mental elevation and instruction without which many natures grow narrow, many others gloomy, and perhaps, if the truth were known, very few prosper entirely, lit is not that I, who have always lived a good deal in solitude and live in it still more now, and love the country even painfully in my recollections of it, would decry either one or the other–solitude is most effective in a contrast, and if you do not break the bark you cannot bud the tree, and, in short (not to be _in long_), I could write a dissertation, which I will spare you, ‘about it and about it.’ …
Tell George to lend you–nay, I think I will be generous and let him give you, although the author gave me the book–the copy of the new epic, ‘Orion,’ which he has with him. You have probably observed the advertisement, and are properly instructed that Mr. Horne the poet, who has sold three editions already at a farthing a copy, and is selling a fourth at a shilling, and is about to sell a fifth at half a crown (on the precise principle of the aerial machine–launching himself into popularity by a first impulse on the people), is my unknown friend, with whom I have corresponded these four years without having seen his face. Do you remember the beech leaves sent to me from Epping Forest? Yes, you must. Well, the sender is the poet, and the poem I think a very noble one, and I want you to think so too. So hereby I empower you to take it away from George and keep it for my sake–if you will!
Dear Mr. Martin was so kind as to come and see me as you commanded, and I must tell you that I thought him looking so better than well that I was more than commonly glad to see him. Give my love to him, and join me in as much metropolitan missionary zeal as will bring you both to London for six months of the year. Oh, I wish you would come! Not that it is necessary for _you_, but that it will be _so_ good for _us_.
My ivy is growing, and I have _green blinds_, against which there is an outcry. They say that I do it out of envy, and for the equalisation of complexions.
Ever your affectionate,
BA.
_To Mr. Westwood_
50 Wimpole Street: August 1843.
Dear Mr. Westwood,–I thank you very much for the kindness of your questioning, and am able to answer that notwithstanding the, as it seems to you, fatal significance of a woman’s silence, I am alive enough to be sincerely grateful for any degree of interest spent upon me. As to Flush, he should thank you too, but at the present moment he is quite absorbed in finding a cool place in this room to lie down in, having sacrificed his usual favorite place at my feet, his head upon them, oppressed by the torrid necessity of a thermometer above 70. To Flopsy’s acquaintance he would aspire gladly, only hoping that Flopsy does not ‘delight to bark and bite,’ like dogs in general, because if he does Flush would as soon be acquainted with a _cat_, he says, for he does not pretend to be a hero. Poor Flush! ‘the bright summer days on which I am ever likely to take him out for a ramble over hill and meadow’ are never likely to shine! But he follows, or rather leaps into my wheeled chair, and forswears merrier company even now, to be near me. I am a good deal better, it is right to say, and look forward to a possible prospect of being better still, though I may be shut out from climbing the Brocken otherwise than in a vision.
You will see by the length of the ‘Legend'[80] which I send to you (in its only printed form) _why_ I do not send it to you in manuscript. Keep the book as long as you please. My new volume is not yet in the press, but I am writing more and more in a view to it, pleased with the thought that some kind hands are already stretched out in welcome and acceptance of what it may become. Not as idle as I appear, I have also been writing some fugitive verses for American magazines. This is my confession. Forgive its tediousness, and believe me thankfully and very sincerely yours,
ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.
[Footnote 80: _The Lay of the Brown Rosary_.]
_To Mr. Westwood_
50 Wimpole Street: September 2, 1843.
Dear Mr. Westwood,–Your letter comes to remind me how much I ought to be ashamed of myself…. I received the book in all safety, and read your kind words about my ‘Rosary’ with more grateful satisfaction than appears from the evidence. It is great pleasure to me to have written for such readers, and it is great hope to me to be able to write for them. The transcription of the ‘Rosary’ is a compliment which I never anticipated, or you should have had the manuscript copy you asked for, although I have not a perfect one in my hands. The poem is full of faults, as, indeed, all my poems appear to myself to be when I look back upon them instead of looking down. I hope to be worthier in poetry some day of the generous appreciation which you and your friends have paid me in advance.
Tennyson is a great poet, I think, and Browning, the author of ‘Paracelsus,’ has to my mind very noble capabilities. Do you know Mr. Horne’s ‘Orion,’ the poem published for a farthing, to the wonder of booksellers and bookbuyers who could not understand ‘the speculation in its eyes?’ There are very fine things in this poem, and altogether I recommend it to your attention. But what is ‘wanting’ in Tennyson? He can think, he can feel, and his language is highly expressive, characteristic, and harmonious. I am very fond of Tennyson. He makes me thrill sometimes to the end of my fingers, as only a true great poet can.
You praise me kindly, and if, indeed, the considerations you speak of could be true of me, I am not one who could lament having ‘learnt in suffering what I taught in song.’ In any case, working for the future and counting gladly on those who are likely to consider any work of mine acceptable to themselves, I shall be very sure not to forget my friends at Enfield.
Dear Mr. Westwood, I remain sincerely yours, ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.
_To Mrs. Martin_
September 4, 1843. Finished September 5.
My dearest Mrs. Martin, … I have had a great gratification within this week or two in receiving a letter–nay, two letters–from Miss Martineau, one of the last strangers in the world from whom I had any right to expect a kindness. Yet most kind, most touching in kindness, were both of these letters, so much so that I was not far from crying for pleasure as I read them. She is very hopelessly ill, you are probably aware, at Tynemouth in Northumberland, suffering agonies from internal cancer, and conquering occasional repose by the strength of opium, but ‘almost forgetting’ (to use her own words) ‘to wish for health, in the intense enjoyment of pleasures independent of the body.’ She sent me a little work of hers called ‘Traditions of Palestine.’ Her friends had hoped by the stationary character of some symptoms that the disease was suspended, but lately it is said to be gaining ground, and the serenity and elevation of her mind are more and more triumphantly evident as the bodily pangs thicken….
And now I am going to tell you what will surprise you, if you do not know it already. Stormie and Georgie are passing George’s vacation on the Rhine. You are certainly surprised if you did not know it. Papa signed and sealed them away on the ground of its being good and refreshing for both of them, and I was even mixed up a little with the diplomacy of it, until I found _they were going_, and then it was a hard, terrible struggle with me to be calm and see them go. But _that_ was childish, and when I had heard from them at Ostend I grew more satisfied again, and attained to think less of the fatal influences of _my star_. They went away in great spirits, Stormie ‘quite elated,’ to use his own words, and then at the end of the six weeks they _must_ be at home at Sessions; and no possible way of passing the interim could be pleasanter and better and more exhilarating for themselves. The plan was to go from Ostend by railroad to Brussels and Cologne, then to pass down the Rhine to Switzerland, spend a few days at Geneva, and a week in Paris as they return. The only fear is that Stormie won’t go to Paris. We have too many friends there–a strange obstacle.
Dearest Mrs. Martin, I am doing something more than writing you a letter, I think.
May God bless you all with the most enduring consolations! Give my love to Mr. Martin, and believe also, both of you, in my sympathy. I am glad that your poor Fanny should be so supported. May God bless her and all of you!
Dearest Mrs. Martin’s affectionate
BA.
I am very well for _me_, and was out in the chair yesterday.
_To H.S. Boyd_
September 8, 1843.
My very dear Friend,–I ask you humbly not to fancy me in a passion whenever I happen to be silent. For a woman to be silent is ominous, I know, but it need not be significant of anything quite so terrible as ill-humour. And yet it always happens so; if I do not write I am sure to be cross in your opinion. You set me down directly as ‘hurt,’ which means _irritable_; or ‘offended,’ which means _sulky_; your ideal of me having, in fact, ‘its finger in its eye’ all day long.
I, on the contrary, humbled as I was by your hard criticism of my soft rhymes about Flush,[81] waited for Arabel to carry a message for me, begging to know whether you would care at all to see my ‘Cry of the Children'[82] before I sent it to you. But Arabel went without telling me that she was going: twice she went to St. John’s Wood and made no sign; and now I find myself thrown on my own resources. Will you see the ‘Cry of the Human'[83] or not? It will not please you, probably. It wants melody. The versification is eccentric to the ear, and the subject (the factory miseries) is scarcely an agreeable one to the fancy. Perhaps altogether you had better not see it, because I know you think me to be deteriorating, and I don’t want you to have further hypothetical evidence of so false an opinion. Humbled as I am, I say ‘so false an opinion.’ Frankly, if not humbly, I believe myself to have gained power since the time of the publication of the ‘Seraphim,’ and lost nothing except happiness. Frankly, if not humbly!
With regard to the ‘House of Clouds'[84] I disagree both with you and Miss Mitford, thinking it, comparatively with my other poems, neither so bad nor so good as you two account it. It has certainly been singled out for great praise both at home and abroad, and only the other day Mr. Horne wrote to me to reproach me for not having mentioned it to him, because he came upon it accidentally and considered it ‘one of my best productions.’ Mr. Kenyon holds the same opinion. As for Flush’s verses, they are what I call cobweb verses, thin and light enough; and Arabel was mistaken in telling you that Miss Mitford gave the prize to them. Her words were, ‘They are as tender and true as anything you ever wrote, but nothing is equal to the “House of Clouds.”‘ Those were her words, or to that effect, and I refer to them to you, not for the sake of Flush’s verses, which really do not appear even to myself, their writer, worth a defence, but for the sake of _your_ judgment of _her_ accuracy in judging.
Lately I have received two letters from the profoundest woman thinker in England, Miss Martineau–letters which touched me deeply while they gave me pleasure I did not expect.
My poor Flush has fallen into tribulation. Think of Catiline, the great savage Cuba bloodhound belonging to this house, attempting last night to worry him just as the first Catiline did Cicero. Flush was rescued, but not before he had been wounded severely: and this morning he is on three legs and in great depression of spirits. My poor, poor Flushie! He lies on my sofa and looks up to me with most pathetic eyes.
Where is Annie? If I send my love to her, will it ever be found again?
May God bless you both!
Dearest Mr. Boyd’s affectionate and grateful E.B.B.
[Footnote 81: ‘To Flush, my dog’ (_Poetical Works_, iii. 19).]
[Footnote 82: Published in _Blackwood’s Magazine_ for August 1843, and called forth by Mr. Horne’s report as assistant commissioner on the employment of children in mines and manufactories.]
[Footnote 83: Evidently a slip of the pen for ‘Children.’]
[Footnote 84: _Poetical Works_, iii. 186. Mr. Boyd’s opinion of it may be learnt from Miss Barrett’s letter to Horne, dated August 31, 1843 (_Letters to R.H. Horne_, i. 84): ‘Mr. Boyd told me that he had read my papers on the Greek Fathers with the more satisfaction because he had inferred from my “House of Clouds” that illness had _impaired my faculties_.’]
_To H.S. Boyd_
Monday, September 19, 1843.
My own dear Friend,–I should have written instantly to explain myself out of appearances which did me injustice, only I have been in such distress as to have no courage for writing. Flush was stolen away, and for three days I could neither sleep nor eat, nor do anything much more rational than cry. _Confiteor tibi_, oh reverend father. And if you call me very silly, I am so used to the reproach throughout the week as to be hardened to the point of vanity. The worst of it is, now, that there will be no need of more ‘Houses of Clouds’ to prove to you the deterioration of my faculties. Q.E.D.
In my own defence, I really believe that my distress arose somewhat less from the mere separation from dear little Flushie than from the consideration of how he was breaking his heart, cast upon the cruel world. Formerly, when he has been prevented from sleeping on my bed he has passed the night in moaning piteously, and often he has refused to eat from a strange hand. And then he loves me, heart to heart; there was no exaggeration in my verses about him, if there was no poetry. And when I heard that he cried in the street and then vanished, there was little wonder that I, on my part, should cry in the house.
With great difficulty we hunted the dog-banditti into their caves of the city, and bribed them into giving back their victim. Money was the least thing to think of in such case; I would have given a thousand pounds if I had had them in my hand. The audacity of the wretched men was marvellous. They said that they had been ‘about stealing Flush these two years,’ and warned us plainly to take care of him for the future.
The joy of the meeting between Flush and me would be a good subject for a Greek ode–I recommend it to you. It might take rank next to the epical parting of Hector and Andromache. He dashed up the stairs into my room and into my arms, where I hugged him and kissed him, black as he was–black as if imbued in a distillation of St. Giles’s. Ah, I can break jests about it _now_, you see. Well, to go back to the explanations I promised to give you, I must tell you that Arabel _perfectly forgot_ to say a word to me about ‘Blackwood’ and your wish that I should send the magazine. It was only after I heard that you had procured it yourself, and after I mentioned this to her, that she remembered her omission all at once. Therefore I am quite vexed and disappointed, I beg you to believe–_I_, who have pleasure in giving you any printed verses of mine that you care to have. Never mind! I may print another volume before long, and lay it at your feet. In the meantime, you _endure_ my ‘Cry of the Children’ better than I had anticipated–just because I never anticipated your being able to read it to the end, and was over-delicate of placing it in your hands on that very account. My dearest Mr. Boyd, you are right in your complaint against the rhythm. The first stanza came into my head in a hurricane, and I was obliged to make the other stanzas like it–_that_ is the whole mystery of the iniquity. If you look Mr. Lucas from head to foot, you will never find such a rhythm on his person. The whole crime of the versification belongs to _me_. So blame _me_, and by no means another poet, and I will humbly confess that I deserve to be blamed in some _measure_. There is a roughness, my own ear being witness, and I give up the body of my criminal to the rod of your castigation, kissing the last as if it were Flush.
A report runs in London that Mr. Boyd says of Elizabeth Barrett: ‘She is a person of the most perverted judgment in England.’ Now, if this be true, I shall not mend my evil position in your opinion, my very dear friend, by confessing that I differ with you, the more the longer I live, on the ground of what you call ‘jumping lines.’ I am speaking not of particular cases, but of the principle, the general principle, of these cases, and the tenacity of my judgment does not arise from the teaching of ‘Mr. Lucas,’ but from the deeper study of the old master-poets–English poets–those of the Elizabeth and James ages, before the corruption of French rhythms stole in with Waller and Denham, and was acclimated into a national inodorousness by Dryden and Pope. We differ so much upon this subject that we must proceed by agreeing to differ, and end, perhaps, by finding it agreeable to differ; there can be no possible use in an argument. Only you must be upright in justice, and find Wordsworth innocent of misleading me. So far from having read him more within these three years, I have read him _less_, and have taken no new review, I do assure you, of his position and character as a poet, and these facts are testified unto by the other fact that my poetry, neither in its best features nor its worst, is adjusted after the fashion of his school.
But I am writing too much; you will have no patience with me. ‘The Excursion’ is accused of being lengthy, and so you will tell me that I convict myself of plagiarism, _currente calamo_.
I have just finished a poem of some eight hundred lines, called ‘The Vision of Poets,'[85] philosophical, allegorical–anything but popular. It is in stanzas, every one an octosyllabic triplet, which you will think odd, and I have not _sanguinity_ enough to defend.
May God bless you, my dearest Mr. Boyd! Yes, I heard–I was glad to hear–of your having resumed that which used to be so great a pleasure to you–Miss Marcus’s society. I remain,
Affectionately and gratefully yours,
ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.
My love to dear Annie.
[Footnote 85: _Poetical Works_, i. 223.]
_To Mr. Westwood_
October 1843.
You are probably right in respect to Tennyson, for whom, with all my admiration of him, I would willingly secure more exaltation and a broader clasping of truth. Still, it is not possible to have so much beauty without a certain portion of truth, the position of the Utilitarians being true in the inverse. But I think as I did of ‘uses’ and ‘responsibilities,’ and do hold that the poet is a preacher and must look to his doctrine.
Perhaps Mr. Tennyson will grow more solemn, like the sun, as his day goes on. In the meantime we have the noble ‘Two Voices,’ and, among other grand intimations of a teaching power, certain stanzas to J.K. (I think the initials are) on the death of his brother,[86] which very deeply affected me.
Take away the last stanzas, which should be applied more definitely to the _body_, or cut away altogether as a lie against eternal verity, and the poem stands as one of the finest of monodies. The nature of human grief never surely was more tenderly intimated or touched–it brought tears to my eyes. Do read it. He is not a Christian poet, up to this time, but let us listen and hear his next songs. He is one of God’s singers, whether he knows it or does not know it.
I am thinking, lifting up my pen, what I can write to you which is likely to be interesting to you. After all I come to chaos and silence, and even old night–it is growing so dark. I live in London, to be sure, and except for the glory of it I might live in a desert, so profound is my solitude and so complete my isolation from things and persons without. I lie all day, and day after day, on the sofa, and my windows do not even look into the street. To abuse myself with a vain deceit of rural life I have had ivy planted in a box, and it has flourished and spread over one window, and strikes against the glass with a little stroke from the thicker leaves when the wind blows at all briskly. _Then_ I think of forests and groves; it is my triumph when the leaves strike the window pane, and this is not a sound like a lament. Books and thoughts and dreams (almost too consciously _dreamed_, however, for me–the illusion of them has almost passed) and domestic tenderness can and ought to leave nobody lamenting. Also God’s wisdom, deeply steeped in His love, _is_ as far as we can stretch out our hands.
[Footnote 86: The lines ‘To J.S.,’ which begin:
‘The wind that beats the mountain blows More softly round the open wold.’
_To Mr. Westwood_
50 Wimpole Street: December 26, 1843.
Dear Mr. Westwood,–You think me, perhaps, and not without apparent reason, ungrateful and insensible to your letter, but indeed I am neither one nor the other, and I am writing now to try and prove it to you. I was much touched by some tones of kindness in the letter, and it was welcome altogether, and I did not need the ‘owl’ which came after to waken me, because I was wide awake enough from the first moment; and now I see that you have been telling your beads, while I seemed to be telling nothing, in that dread silence of mine. May all true saints of poetry be propitious to the wearer of the ‘Rosary.’
In answer to a question which you put to me long ago on the subject of books of theology, I will confess to you that, although I have read rather widely the divinity of the Greek Fathers, Gregory, Chrysostom, and so forth, and have of course informed myself in the works generally of our old English divines, Hooker, Jeremy Taylor, and so forth, I am not by any means a frequent reader of books of theology as such, and as the men of our times have made them. I have looked into the ‘Tracts’ from curiosity and to hear what the world was talking of, and I was disappointed _even_ in the degree of intellectual power displayed in them. From motives of a desire of theological instruction I very seldom read any book except God’s own. The minds of persons are differently constituted; and it is no praise to mine to admit that I am apt to receive less of what is called edification from human discourses on divine subjects, than disturbance and hindrance. I read the Scriptures every day, and in as simple a spirit as I can; thinking as little as possible of the controversies engendered in that great sunshine, and as much as possible of the heat and glory belonging to it. It is a sure fact in my eyes that we do not require so much _more knowledge_, as a stronger apprehension, by the faith and affections, of what we already know.
You will be sorry to hear that Mr. Tennyson is not well, although his friends talk of nervousness, and do not fear much ultimate mischief….[87]
It is such a lovely _May_ day, that I am afraid of breaking the spell by writing down Christmas wishes.
Very faithfully yours,
ELIZABETH BARRETT.
[Footnote 87: About the same date she writes to Home (_Letters to R.H. Horne_, i. 86): ‘I am very glad to hear that nothing really very bad is the matter with Tennyson. If anything were to happen to Tennyson, the world should go into mourning.’]
_To Mr. Westwood_
50 Wimpole Street: December 31, 1843.
If you do find the paper I was invited to write upon Wordsworth[88], you will see to which class of your admiring or abhorring friends I belong. Perhaps you will cry out quickly, ‘To the blind admirers, certes.’ And I have a high admiration of Wordsworth. His spirit has worked a good work, and has freed into the capacity of work other noble spirits. He took the initiative in a great poetic movement, and is not only to be praised for what he has done, but for what he has helped his age to do. For the rest, Byron has more passion and intensity, Shelley more fancy and music, Coleridge could see further