Letters

_R.B. to E.B.B._

New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey.
[Post-mark, January 10, 1845.]

I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,--and this is
no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write,--whatever else,
no prompt matter-of-course recognition of your genius, and there a
graceful and natural end of the thing. Since the day last week when I
first read your poems, I quite laugh to remember how I have been
turning and turning again in my mind what I should be able to tell you
of their effect upon me, for in the first flush of delight I thought I
would this once get out of my habit of purely passive enjoyment, when
I do really enjoy, and thoroughly justify my admiration--perhaps even,
as a loyal fellow-craftsman should, try and find fault and do you some
little good to be proud of hereafter!--but nothing comes of it all--so
into me has it gone, and part of me has it become, this great living
poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew--Oh, how
different that is from lying to be dried and pressed flat, and prized
highly, and put in a book with a proper account at top and bottom,
and shut up and put away ... and the book called a 'Flora,' besides!
After all, I need not give up the thought of doing that, too, in time;
because even now, talking with whoever is worthy, I can give a reason
for my faith in one and another excellence, the fresh strange music,
the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave
thought; but in this addressing myself to you--your own self, and for
the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say, love
these books with all my heart--and I love you too. Do you know I was
once not very far from seeing--really seeing you? Mr. Kenyon said to
me one morning 'Would you like to see Miss Barrett?' then he went to
announce me,--then he returned ... you were too unwell, and now it is
years ago, and I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels, as if
I had been close, so close, to some world's-wonder in chapel or crypt,
only a screen to push and I might have entered, but there was some
slight, so it now seems, slight and just sufficient bar to admission,
and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles,
and the sight was never to be?

Well, these Poems were to be, and this true thankful joy and pride
with which I feel myself,

Yours ever faithfully,

ROBERT BROWNING.

Miss Barrett,[1]
50 Wimpole St.
R. Browning.

[Footnote 1: With this and the following letter the addresses on the
envelopes are given; for all subsequent letters the addresses are the
same. The correspondence passed through the post.]

_E.B.B. to R.B._

50 Wimpole Street: Jan. 11, 1845.

I thank you, dear Mr. Browning, from the bottom of my heart. You meant
to give me pleasure by your letter--and even if the object had not
been answered, I ought still to thank you. But it is thoroughly
answered. Such a letter from such a hand! Sympathy is dear--very dear
to me: but the sympathy of a poet, and of such a poet, is the
quintessence of sympathy to me! Will you take back my gratitude for
it?--agreeing, too, that of all the commerce done in the world, from
Tyre to Carthage, the exchange of sympathy for gratitude is the most
princely thing!

For the rest you draw me on with your kindness. It is difficult to get
rid of people when you once have given them too much pleasure--_that_
is a fact, and we will not stop for the moral of it. What I was going
to say--after a little natural hesitation--is, that if ever you emerge
without inconvenient effort from your 'passive state,' and will _tell_
me of such faults as rise to the surface and strike you as important
in my poems, (for of course, I do not think of troubling you with
criticism in detail) you will confer a lasting obligation on me, and
one which I shall value so much, that I covet it at a distance. I do
not pretend to any extraordinary meekness under criticism and it is
possible enough that I might not be altogether obedient to yours. But
with my high respect for your power in your Art and for your
experience as an artist, it would be quite impossible for me to hear a
general observation of yours on what appear to you my master-faults,
without being the better for it hereafter in some way. I ask for only
a sentence or two of general observation--and I do not ask even for
_that_, so as to tease you--but in the humble, low voice, which is so
excellent a thing in women--particularly when they go a-begging! The
most frequent general criticism I receive, is, I think, upon the
style,--'if I _would_ but change my style'! But _that_ is an objection
(isn't it?) to the writer bodily? Buffon says, and every sincere
writer must feel, that '_Le style c'est l'homme_'; a fact, however,
scarcely calculated to lessen the objection with certain critics.

Is it indeed true that I was so near to the pleasure and honour of
making your acquaintance? and can it be true that you look back upon
the lost opportunity with any regret? _But_--you know--if you had
entered the 'crypt,' you might have caught cold, or been tired to
death, and _wished_ yourself 'a thousand miles off;' which would have
been worse than travelling them. It is not my interest, however, to
put such thoughts in your head about its being 'all for the best'; and
I would rather hope (as I do) that what I lost by one chance I may
recover by some future one. Winters shut me up as they do dormouse's
eyes; in the spring, _we shall see_: and I am so much better that I
seem turning round to the outward world again. And in the meantime I
have learnt to know your voice, not merely from the poetry but from
the kindness in it. Mr. Kenyon often speaks of you--dear Mr.
Kenyon!--who most unspeakably, or only speakably with tears in my
eyes,--has been my friend and helper, and my book's friend and helper!
critic and sympathiser, true friend of all hours! You know him well
enough, I think, to understand that I must be grateful to him.

I am writing too much,--and notwithstanding that I am writing too
much, I will write of one thing more. I will say that I am your
debtor, not only for this cordial letter and for all the pleasure
which came with it, but in other ways, and those the highest: and I
will say that while I live to follow this divine art of poetry, in
proportion to my love for it and my devotion to it, I must be a devout
admirer and student of your works. This is in my heart to say to
you--and I say it.

And, for the rest, I am proud to remain

Your obliged and faithful

ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

Robert Browning, Esq.
New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey.
Jan. 13, 1845.

Dear Miss Barrett,--I just shall say, in as few words as I can, that
you make me very happy, and that, now the beginning is over, I dare
say I shall do better, because my poor praise, number one, was nearly
as felicitously brought out, as a certain tribute to no less a
personage than Tasso, which I was amused with at Rome some weeks ago,
in a neat pencilling on the plaister-wall by his tomb at
Sant'Onofrio--'Alla cara memoria--di--(please fancy solemn interspaces
and grave capital letters at the new lines) di--Torquato Tasso--il
Dottore Bernardini--offriva--il seguente Carme--_O tu_'--and no
more,--the good man, it should seem, breaking down with the overload
of love here! But my 'O tu'--was breathed out most sincerely, and now
you have taken it in gracious part, the rest will come after.
Only,--and which is why I write now--it looks as if I have introduced
some phrase or other about 'your faults' so cleverly as to give
exactly the opposite meaning to what I meant, which was, that in my
first ardour I had thought to tell you of _everything_ which impressed
me in your verses, down, even, to whatever 'faults' I could find,--a
good earnest, when I had got to _them_, that I had left out not much
between--as if some Mr. Fellows were to say, in the overflow of his
first enthusiasm of rewarded adventure: 'I will describe you all the
outer life and ways of these Lycians, down to their very
sandal-thongs,' whereto the be-corresponded one rejoins--'Shall I get
next week, then, your dissertation on sandal-thongs'? Yes, and a
little about the 'Olympian Horses,' and God-charioteers as well!

What 'struck me as faults,' were not matters on the removal of which,
one was to have--poetry, or high poetry,--but the very highest poetry,
so I thought, and that, to universal recognition. For myself, or any
artist, in many of the cases there would be a positive loss of time,
peculiar artist's pleasure--for an instructed eye loves to see where
the brush has dipped twice in a lustrous colour, has lain insistingly
along a favourite outline, dwelt lovingly in a grand shadow; for these
'too muches' for the everybody's picture are so many helps to the
making out the real painter's picture as he had it in his brain. And
all of the Titian's Naples Magdalen must have once been golden in its
degree to justify that heap of hair in her hands--the _only_ gold
effected now!

But about this soon--for night is drawing on and I go out, yet cannot,
quiet at conscience, till I report (to _myself_, for I never said it
to you, I think) that your poetry must be, cannot but be, infinitely
more to me than mine to you--for you _do_ what I always wanted, hoped
to do, and only seem now likely to do for the first time. You speak
out, _you_,--I only make men and women speak--give you truth broken
into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in
me, but I am going to try; so it will be no small comfort to have your
company just now, seeing that when you have your men and women
aforesaid, you are busied with them, whereas it seems bleak,
melancholy work, this talking to the wind (for I have begun)--yet I
don't think I shall let _you_ hear, after all, the savage things about
Popes and imaginative religions that I must say.

See how I go on and on to you, I who, whenever now and then pulled, by
the head and hair, into letter-writing, get sorrowfully on for a line
or two, as the cognate creature urged on by stick and string, and then
come down 'flop' upon the sweet haven of page one, line last, as
serene as the sleep of the virtuous! You will never more, I hope, talk
of 'the honour of my acquaintance,' but I will joyfully wait for the
delight of your friendship, and the spring, and my Chapel-sight after
all!

Ever yours most faithfully,

R. BROWNING.

For Mr. Kenyon--I have a convenient theory about _him_, and his
otherwise quite unaccountable kindness to me; but 'tis quite night
now, and they call me.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

50 Wimpole Street: Jan. 15, 1845.

Dear Mr. Browning,--The fault was clearly with me and not with you.

When I had an Italian master, years ago, he told me that there was an
unpronounceable English word which absolutely expressed me, and which
he would say in his own tongue, as he could not in mine--'_testa
lunga_.' Of course, the signor meant _headlong_!--and now I have had
enough to tame me, and might be expected to stand still in my stall.
But you see I do not. Headlong I was at first, and headlong I
continue--precipitously rushing forward through all manner of nettles
and briars instead of keeping the path; guessing at the meaning of
unknown words instead of looking into the dictionary--tearing open
letters, and never untying a string,--and expecting everything to be
done in a minute, and the thunder to be as quick as the lightning. And
so, at your half word I flew at the whole one, with all its possible
consequences, and wrote what you read. Our common friend, as I think
he is, Mr. Horne, is often forced to entreat me into patience and
coolness of purpose, though his only intercourse with me has been by
letter. And, by the way, you will be sorry to hear that during his
stay in Germany _he_ has been 'headlong' (out of a metaphor) twice;
once, in falling from the Drachenfels, when he only just saved himself
by catching at a vine; and once quite lately, at Christmas, in a fall
on the ice of the Elbe in skating, when he dislocated his left
shoulder in a very painful manner. He is doing quite well, I believe,
but it was sad to have such a shadow from the German Christmas tree,
and he a stranger.

In art, however, I understand that it does not do to be headlong, but
patient and laborious--and there is a love strong enough, even in me,
to overcome nature. I apprehend what you mean in the criticism you
just intimate, and shall turn it over and over in my mind until I get
practical good from it. What no mere critic sees, but what you, an
artist, know, is the difference between the thing desired and the
thing attained, between the idea in the writer's mind and the [Greek:
eid�lon] cast off in his work. All the effort--the quick'ning of the
breath and beating of the heart in pursuit, which is ruffling and
injurious to the general effect of a composition; all which you call
'insistency,' and which many would call superfluity, and which _is_
superfluous in a sense--_you_ can pardon, because you understand. The
great chasm between the thing I say, and the thing I would say, would
be quite dispiriting to me, in spite even of such kindnesses as yours,
if the desire did not master the despondency. 'Oh for a horse with
wings!' It is wrong of me to write so of myself--only you put your
finger on the root of a fault, which has, to my fancy, been a little
misapprehended. I do not _say everything I think_ (as has been said of
me by master-critics) but I _take every means to say what I think_,
which is different!--or I fancy so!

In one thing, however, you are wrong. Why should you deny the full
measure of my delight and benefit from your writings? I could tell you
why you should not. You have in your vision two worlds, or to use the
language of the schools of the day, you are both subjective and
objective in the habits of your mind. You can deal both with abstract
thought and with human passion in the most passionate sense. Thus, you
have an immense grasp in Art; and no one at all accustomed to consider
the usual forms of it, could help regarding with reverence and
gladness the gradual expansion of your powers. Then you are
'masculine' to the height--and I, as a woman, have studied some of
your gestures of language and intonation wistfully, as a thing beyond
me far! and the more admirable for being beyond.

Of your new work I hear with delight. How good of you to tell me. And
it is not dramatic in the strict sense, I am to understand--(am I
right in understanding so?) and you speak, in your own person 'to the
winds'? no--but to the thousand living sympathies which will awake to
hear you. A great dramatic power may develop itself otherwise than in
the formal drama; and I have been guilty of wishing, before this hour
(for reasons which I will not thrust upon you after all my tedious
writing), that you would give the public a poem unassociated directly
or indirectly with the stage, for a trial on the popular heart. I
reverence the drama, but--

_But_ I break in on myself out of consideration for you. I might have
done it, you will think, before. I vex your 'serene sleep of the
virtuous' like a nightmare. Do not say 'No.' I am _sure_ I do! As to
the vain parlance of the world, I did not talk of the 'honour of your
acquaintance' without a true sense of honour, indeed; but I shall
willingly exchange it all (and _now_, if you please, at this moment,
for fear of worldly mutabilities) for the 'delight of your
friendship.'

Believe me, therefore, dear Mr. Browning,

Faithfully yours, and gratefully,

ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

For Mr. Kenyon's kindness, as _I_ see it, no theory will account. I
class it with mesmerism for that reason.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

New Cross, Hatcham, Monday Night.
[Post-mark, January 28, 1845.]

Dear Miss Barrett,--Your books lie on my table here, at arm's length
from me, in this old room where I sit all day: and when my head aches
or wanders or strikes work, as it now or then will, I take my chance
for either green-covered volume, as if it were so much fresh trefoil
to feel in one's hands this winter-time,--and round I turn, and,
putting a decisive elbow on three or four half-done-with 'Bells' of
mine, read, read, read, and just as I have shut up the book and walked
to the window, I recollect that you wanted me to find faults there,
and that, in an unwise hour, I engaged to do so. Meantime, the days
go by (the whitethroat is come and sings now) and as I would not have
you 'look down on me from your white heights' as promise breaker,
evader, or forgetter, if I could help: and as, if I am very candid and
contrite, you may find it in your heart to write to me again--who
knows?--I shall say at once that the said faults cannot be lost, must
be _somewhere_, and shall be faithfully brought you back whenever they
turn up,--as people tell one of missing matters. I am rather exacting,
myself, with my own gentle audience, and get to say spiteful things
about them when they are backward in their dues of appreciation--but
really, _really_--could I be quite sure that anybody as good as--I
must go on, I suppose, and say--as myself, even, were honestly to feel
towards me as I do, towards the writer of 'Bertha,' and the 'Drama,'
and the 'Duchess,' and the 'Page' and--the whole two volumes, I should
be paid after a fashion, I know.

One thing I can do--pencil, if you like, and annotate, and dissertate
upon that I love most and least--I think I can do it, that is.

Here an odd memory comes--of a friend who,--volunteering such a
service to a sonnet-writing somebody, gave him a taste of his quality
in a side-column of short criticisms on sonnet the First, and starting
off the beginning three lines with, of course, 'bad, worse,
worst'--made by a generous mintage of words to meet the sudden run of
his epithets, 'worser, worserer, worserest' pay off the second terzet
in full--no 'badder, badderer, badderest' fell to the _Second's_
allowance, and 'worser' &c. answered the demands of the Third;
'worster, worsterer, worsterest' supplied the emergency of the Fourth;
and, bestowing his last 'worserestest and worstestest' on lines 13 and
14, my friend (slapping his forehead like an emptied strong-box)
frankly declared himself bankrupt, and honourably incompetent, to
satisfy the reasonable expectations of the rest of the series!

What an illustration of the law by which opposite ideas suggest
opposite, and contrary images come together!

See now, how, of that 'Friendship' you offer me (and here Juliet's
word rises to my lips)--I feel sure once and for ever. I have got
already, I see, into this little pet-handwriting of mine (not anyone
else's) which scratches on as if theatrical copyists (ah me!) and
BRADBURY AND EVANS' READER were not! But you shall get something
better than this nonsense one day, if you will have patience with
me--hardly better, though, because this does me real good, gives real
relief, to write. After all, you know nothing, next to nothing of me,
and that stops me. Spring is to come, however!

If you hate writing to me as I hate writing to nearly everybody, I
pray you never write--if you do, as you say, care for anything I have
done. I will simply assure you, that meaning to begin work in deep
earnest, _begin_ without affectation, God knows,--I do not know what
will help me more than hearing from you,--and therefore, if you do not
so very much hate it, I know I _shall_ hear from you--and very little
more about your 'tiring me.'

Ever yours faithfully,

ROBERT BROWNING.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

50 Walpole Street: Feb. 3, 1845.
[Transcriber's Note: So in original. Should be "Wimpole Street."]

Why how could I hate to write to you, dear Mr. Browning? Could you
believe in such a thing? If nobody likes writing to everybody (except
such professional letter writers as you and I are _not_), yet
everybody likes writing to somebody, and it would be strange and
contradictory if I were not always delighted both to hear from _you_
and to write to _you_, this talking upon paper being as good a social
pleasure as another, when our means are somewhat straitened. As for
me, I have done most of my talking by post of late years--as people
shut up in dungeons take up with scrawling mottoes on the walls. Not
that I write to many in the way of regular correspondence, as our
friend Mr. Horne predicates of me in his romances (which is mere
romancing!), but that there are a few who will write and be written to
by me without a sense of injury. Dear Miss Mitford, for instance. You
do not know her, I think, personally, although she was the first to
tell me (when I was very ill and insensible to all the glories of the
world except poetry), of the grand scene in 'Pippa Passes.' _She_ has
filled a large drawer in this room with delightful letters, heart-warm
and soul-warm, ... driftings of nature (if sunshine could drift like
snow), and which, if they should ever fall the way of all writing,
into print, would assume the folio shape as a matter of course, and
take rank on the lowest shelf of libraries, with Benedictine editions
of the Fathers, [Greek: k.t.l.]. I write this to you to show how I can
have pleasure in letters, and never think them too long, nor too
frequent, nor too illegible from being written in little 'pet hands.'
I can read any MS. except the writing on the pyramids. And if you will
only promise to treat me _en bon camarade_, without reference to the
conventionalities of 'ladies and gentlemen,' taking no thought for
your sentences (nor for mine), nor for your blots (nor for mine), nor
for your blunt speaking (nor for mine), nor for your badd speling (nor
for mine), and if you agree to send me a blotted thought whenever you
are in the mind for it, and with as little ceremony and less
legibility than you would think it necessary to employ towards your
printer--why, _then_, I am ready to sign and seal the contract, and to
rejoice in being 'articled' as your correspondent. Only _don't_ let us
have any constraint, any ceremony! _Don't_ be civil to me when you
feel rude,--nor loquacious when you incline to silence,--nor yielding
in the manners when you are perverse in the mind. See how out of the
world I am! Suffer me to profit by it in almost the only profitable
circumstance, and let us rest from the bowing and the courtesying,
you and I, on each side. You will find me an honest man on the whole,
if rather hasty and prejudging, which is a different thing from
prejudice at the worst. And we have great sympathies in common, and I
am inclined to look up to you in many things, and to learn as much of
everything as you will teach me. On the other hand you must prepare
yourself to forbear and to forgive--will you? While I throw off the
ceremony, I hold the faster to the kindness.

Is it true, as you say, that I 'know so "little"' of you? And is it
true, as others say, that the productions of an artist do not partake
of his real nature, ... that in the minor sense, man is not made in
the image of God? It is _not_ true, to my mind--and therefore it is
not true that I know little of you, except in as far as it is true
(which I believe) that your greatest works are to come. Need I assure
you that I shall always hear with the deepest interest every word you
will say to me of what you are doing or about to do? I hear of the
'old room' and the '"Bells" lying about,' with an interest which you
may guess at, perhaps. And when you tell me besides, of _my poems
being there_, and of your caring for them so much beyond the tide-mark
of my hopes, the pleasure rounds itself into a charm, and prevents its
own expression. Overjoyed I am with this cordial sympathy--but it is
better, I feel, to try to justify it by future work than to thank you
for it now. I think--if I may dare to name myself with you in the
poetic relation--that we both have high views of the Art we follow,
and stedfast purpose in the pursuit of it, and that we should not,
either of _us_, be likely to be thrown from the course, by the casting
of any Atalanta-ball of speedy popularity. But I do not know, I cannot
guess, whether you are liable to be pained deeply by hard criticism
and cold neglect, such as original writers like yourself are too often
exposed to--or whether the love of Art is enough for you, and the
exercise of Art the filling joy of your life. Not that praise must not
always, of necessity, be delightful to the artist, but that it may be
redundant to his content. Do you think so? or not? It appears to me
that poets who, like Keats, are highly susceptible to criticism, must
be jealous, in their own persons, of the future honour of their works.
Because, if a work is worthy, honour must follow it, though the worker
should not live to see that following overtaking. Now, is it not
enough that the work be honoured--enough I mean, for the worker? And
is it not enough to keep down a poet's ordinary wearing anxieties, to
think, that if his work be worthy it will have honour, and, if not,
that 'Sparta must have nobler sons than he'? I am writing nothing
applicable, I see, to anything in question, but when one falls into a
favourite train of thought, one indulges oneself in thinking on. I
began in thinking and wondering what sort of artistic constitution you
had, being determined, as you may observe (with a sarcastic smile at
the impertinence), to set about knowing as much as possible of you
immediately. Then you spoke of your 'gentle audience' (_you began_),
and I, who know that you have not one but many enthusiastic
admirers--the 'fit and few' in the intense meaning--yet not the
_diffused_ fame which will come to you presently, wrote on, down the
margin of the subject, till I parted from it altogether. But, after
all, we are on the proper matter of sympathy. And after all, and after
all that has been said and mused upon the 'natural ills,' the anxiety,
and wearing out experienced by the true artist,--is not the _good_
immeasurably greater than the _evil_? Is it not great good, and great
joy? For my part, I wonder sometimes--I surprise myself wondering--how
without such an object and purpose of life, people find it worth while
to live at all. And, for happiness--why, my only idea of happiness, as
far as my personal enjoyment is concerned, (but I have been
straightened in some respects and in comparison with the majority of
livers!) lies deep in poetry and its associations. And then, the
escape from pangs of heart and bodily weakness--when you throw off
_yourself_--what you feel to be _yourself_--into another atmosphere
and into other relations where your life may spread its wings out new,
and gather on every separate plume a brightness from the sun of the
sun! Is it possible that imaginative writers should be so fond of
depreciating and lamenting over their own destiny? Possible,
certainly--but reasonable, not at all--and grateful, less than
anything!

My faults, my faults--Shall I help you? Ah--you see them too well, I
fear. And do you know that _I_ also have something of your feeling
about 'being about to _begin_,' or I should dare to praise you for
having it. But in you, it is different--it is, in you, a virtue. When
Prometheus had recounted a long list of sorrows to be endured by Io,
and declared at last that he was [Greek: m�dep� en prooimiois],[1]
poor Io burst out crying. And when the author of 'Paracelsus' and the
'Bells and Pomegranates' says that he is only 'going to begin' we may
well (to take 'the opposite idea,' as you write) rejoice and clap our
hands. Yet I believe that, whatever you may have done, you _will_ do
what is greater. It is my faith for you.

And how I should like to know what poets have been your sponsors, 'to
promise and vow' for you,--and whether you have held true to early
tastes, or leapt violently from them, and what books you read, and
what hours you write in. How curious I could prove myself!--(if it
isn't proved already).

But this is too much indeed, past all bearing, I suspect. Well, but if
I ever write to you again--I mean, if you wish it--it may be in the
other extreme of shortness. So do not take me for a born heroine of
Richardson, or think that I sin always to this length, else,--you
might indeed repent your quotation from Juliet--which I guessed at
once--and of course--

I have no joy in this contract to-day!
It is too unadvised, too rash and sudden.

Ever faithfully yours,

ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

[Footnote 1: 'Not yet reached the prelude' (Aesch. _Prom._ 741).]

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Hatcham, Tuesday.
[Post-mark, February 11, 1845.]

Dear Miss Barrett,--People would hardly ever tell falsehoods about a
matter, if they had been let tell truth in the beginning, for it is
hard to prophane one's very self, and nobody who has, for instance,
used certain words and ways to a mother or a father _could_, even if
by the devil's help he _would_, reproduce or mimic them with any
effect to anybody else that was to be won over--and so, if 'I love
you' were always outspoken when it might be, there would, I suppose,
be no fear of its desecration at any after time. But lo! only last
night, I had to write, on the part of Mr. Carlyle, to a certain
ungainly, foolish gentleman who keeps back from him, with all the
fussy impotence of stupidity (not bad feeling, alas! for _that_ we
could deal with) a certain MS. letter of Cromwell's which completes
the collection now going to press; and this long-ears had to be 'dear
Sir'd and obedient servanted' till I _said_ (to use a mild word)
'commend me to the sincerities of this kind of thing.'! When I spoke
of you knowing little of me, one of the senses in which I meant so was
this--that I would not well vowel-point my common-place letters and
syllables with a masoretic _other_ sound and sense, make my 'dear'
something intenser than 'dears' in ordinary, and 'yours ever' a
thought more significant than the run of its like. And all this came
of your talking of 'tiring me,' 'being too envious,' &c. &c., which I
should never have heard of had the plain truth looked out of my letter
with its unmistakable eyes. _Now_, what you say of the 'bowing,' and
convention that is to be, and _tant de fa�ons_ that are not to be,
helps me once and for ever--for have I not a right to say simply that,
for reasons I know, for other reasons I don't exactly know, but might
if I chose to think a little, and for still other reasons, which, most
likely, all the choosing and thinking in the world would not make me
know, I had rather hear from you than see anybody else. Never you
care, dear noble Carlyle, nor you, my own friend Alfred over the sea,
nor a troop of true lovers!--Are not their fates written? there! Don't
you answer this, please, but, mind it is on record, and now then, with
a lighter conscience I shall begin replying to your questions. But
then--what I have printed gives _no_ knowledge of me--it evidences
abilities of various kinds, if you will--and a dramatic sympathy with
certain modifications of passion ... _that_ I think--But I never have
begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end--'R.B. a
poem'--and next, if I speak (and, God knows, feel), as if what you
have read were sadly imperfect demonstrations of even mere ability, it
is from no absurd vanity, though it might seem so--these scenes and
song-scraps _are_ such mere and very escapes of my inner power, which
lives in me like the light in those crazy Mediterranean phares I have
watched at sea, wherein the light is ever revolving in a dark gallery,
bright and alive, and only after a weary interval leaps out, for a
moment, from the one narrow chink, and then goes on with the blind
wall between it and you; and, no doubt, _then_, precisely, does the
poor drudge that carries the cresset set himself most busily to trim
the wick--for don't think I want to say I have not worked hard--(this
head of mine knows better)--but the work has been _inside_, and not
when at stated times I held up my light to you--and, that there is no
self-delusion here, I would prove to you (and nobody else), even by
opening this desk I write on, and showing what stuff, in the way of
wood, I _could_ make a great bonfire with, if I might only knock the
whole clumsy top off my tower! Of course, every writing body says the
same, so I gain nothing by the avowal; but when I remember how I have
done what was published, and half done what may never be, I say with
some right, you can know but little of me. Still, I _hope_ sometimes,
though phrenologists will have it that I _cannot_, and am doing
better with this darling 'Luria'--so safe in my head, and a tiny slip
of paper I cover with my thumb!

Then you inquire about my 'sensitiveness to criticism,' and I shall be
glad to tell you exactly, because I have, more than once, taken a
course you might else not understand. I shall live always--that is for
me--I am living here this 1845, that is for London. I write from a
thorough conviction that it is the duty of me, and with the belief
that, after every drawback and shortcoming, I do my best, all things
considered--that is for _me_, and, so being, the not being listened to
by one human creature would, I hope, in nowise affect me. But of
course I must, if for merely scientific purposes, know all about this
1845, its ways and doings, and something I do know, as that for a
dozen cabbages, if I pleased to grow them in the garden here, I might
demand, say, a dozen pence at Covent Garden Market,--and that for a
dozen scenes, of the average goodness, I may challenge as many
plaudits at the theatre close by; and a dozen pages of verse, brought
to the Rialto where verse-merchants most do congregate, ought to bring
me a fair proportion of the Reviewers' gold currency, seeing the other
traders pouch their winnings, as I do see. Well, when they won't pay
me for my cabbages, nor praise me for my poems, I may, if I please,
say 'more's the shame,' and bid both parties 'decamp to the crows,' in
Greek phrase, and _yet_ go very lighthearted back to a garden-full of
rose-trees, and a soul-full of comforts. If they had bought my greens
I should have been able to buy the last number of _Punch_, and go
through the toll-gate of Waterloo Bridge, and give the blind
clarionet-player a trifle, and all without changing my gold. If they
had taken to my books, my father and mother would have been proud of
this and the other 'favourable critique,' and--at least so folks
hold--I should have to pay Mr. Moxon less by a few pounds,
whereas--but you see! Indeed I force myself to say ever and anon, in
the interest of the market-gardeners regular, and Keatses proper,
'It's nothing to _you_, critics, hucksters, all of you, if I _have_
this garden and this conscience--I might go die at Rome, or take to
gin and the newspaper, for what _you_ would care!' So I don't quite
lay open my resources to everybody. But it does so happen, that I have
met with much more than I could have expected in this matter of kindly
and prompt recognition. I never wanted a real set of good hearty
praisers--and no bad reviewers--I am quite content with my share.
No--what I laughed at in my 'gentle audience' is a sad trick the real
admirers have of admiring at the wrong place--enough to make an
apostle swear. _That_ does make me savage--_never_ the other kind of
people; why, think now--take your own 'Drama of Exile' and let _me_
send it to the first twenty men and women that shall knock at your
door to-day and after--of whom the first five are the Postman, the
seller of cheap sealing-wax, Mr. Hawkins Junr, the Butcher for orders,
and the Tax-gatherer--will you let me, by Cornelius Agrippa's
assistance, force these five and these fellows to read, and report on,
this 'Drama'--and, when I have put these faithful reports into fair
English, do you believe they would be better than, if as good, as, the
general run of Periodical criticisms? Not they, I will venture to
affirm. But then--once again, I get these people together and give
them your book, and persuade them, moreover, that by praising it, the
Postman will be helping its author to divide Long Acre into two beats,
one of which she will take with half the salary and all the red
collar,--that a sealing-wax vendor will see red wafers brought into
vogue, and so on with the rest--and won't you just wish for your
_Spectators_ and _Observers_ and Newcastle-upon-Tyne--Hebdomadal
_Mercuries_ back again! You see the inference--I do sincerely esteem
it a perfectly providential and miraculous thing that they are so
well-behaved in ordinary, these critics; and for Keats and Tennyson to
'go softly all their days' for a gruff word or two is quite
inexplicable to me, and always has been. Tennyson reads the
_Quarterly_ and does as they bid him, with the most solemn face in the
world--out goes this, in goes that, all is changed and ranged. Oh me!

Out comes the sun, in comes the _Times_ and eleven strikes (it _does_)
already, and I have to go to Town, and I have no alternative but that
this story of the Critic and Poet, 'the Bear and the Fiddle,' should
'begin but break off in the middle'; yet I doubt--nor will you
henceforth, I know, say, 'I vex you, I am sure, by this lengthy
writing.' Mind that spring is coming, for all this snow; and know me
for yours ever faithfully,

R. BROWNING.

I don't dare--yet I will--ask _can_ you read this? Because I _could_
write a little better, but not so fast. Do you keep writing just as
you do now!

_E.B.B. to R.B._

50 Wimpole Street, February 17, 1845.

Dear Mr. Browning,--To begin with the end (which is only
characteristic of the perverse like myself), I assure you I read your
handwriting as currently as I could read the clearest type from font.
If I had practised the art of reading your letters all my life, I
couldn't do it better. And then I approve of small MS. upon principle.
Think of what an immense quantity of physical energy must go to the
making of those immense sweeping handwritings achieved by some persons
... Mr. Landor, for instance, who writes as if he had the sky for a
copybook and dotted his _i_'s in proportion. People who do such things
should wear gauntlets; yes, and have none to wear; or they wouldn't
waste their time so. People who write--by profession--shall I
say?--never should do it, or what will become of them when most of
their strength retires into their head and heart, (as is the case with
some of us and may be the case with all) and when they have to write a
poem twelve times over, as Mr. Kenyon says I should do if I were
virtuous? Not that I do it. Does anybody do it, I wonder? Do _you_,
ever? From what you tell me of the trimming of the light, I imagine
not. And besides, one may be laborious as a writer, without copying
twelve times over. I believe there are people who will tell you in a
moment what three times six is, without 'doing it' on their fingers;
and in the same way one may work one's verses in one's head quite as
laboriously as on paper--I maintain it. I consider myself a very
patient, laborious writer--though dear Mr. Kenyon laughs me to scorn
when I say so. And just see how it could be otherwise. If I were
netting a purse I might be thinking of something else and drop my
stitches; or even if I were writing verses to please a popular taste,
I might be careless in it. But the pursuit of an Ideal acknowledged by
the mind, _will_ draw and concentrate the powers of the mind--and Art,
you know, is a jealous god and demands the whole man--or woman. I
cannot conceive of a sincere artist who is also a careless one--though
one may have a quicker hand than another, in general,--and though all
are liable to vicissitudes in the degree of facility--and to
entanglements in the machinery, notwithstanding every degree of
facility. You may write twenty lines one day--or even three like
Euripides in three days--and a hundred lines in one more day--and yet
on the hundred, may have been expended as much good work, as on the
twenty and the three. And also, as you say, the lamp is trimmed behind
the wall--and the act of utterance is the evidence of foregone study
still more than it is the occasion to study. The deep interest with
which I read all that you had the kindness to write to me of yourself,
you must trust me for, as I find it hard to express it. It is sympathy
in one way, and interest every way! And now, see! Although you proved
to me with admirable logic that, for reasons which you know and
reasons which you don't know, I couldn't possibly know anything about
you; though that is all true--and proven (which is better than
true)--I really did understand of you before I was told, exactly what
you told me. Yes, I did indeed. I felt sure that as a poet you fronted
the future--and that your chief works, in your own apprehension, were
to come. Oh--I take no credit of sagacity for it; as I did not long
ago to my sisters and brothers, when I professed to have knowledge of
all their friends whom I never saw in my life, by the image coming
with the name; and threw them into shouts of laughter by giving out
all the blue eyes and black eyes and hazel eyes and noses Roman and
Gothic ticketed aright for the Mr. Smiths and Miss Hawkinses,--and hit
the bull's eye and the true features of the case, ten times out of
twelve! But _you_ are different. _You_ are to be made out by the
comparative anatomy system. You have thrown out fragments of _os_ ...
_sublime_ ... indicative of soul-mammothism--and you live to develop
your nature,--_if_ you live. That is easy and plain. You have taken a
great range--from those high faint notes of the mystics which are
beyond personality ... to dramatic impersonations, gruff with nature,
'gr-r-r- you swine'; and when these are thrown into harmony, as in a
manner they are in 'Pippa Passes' (which I could find in my heart to
covet the authorship of, more than any of your works--), the
combinations of effect must always be striking and noble--and you must
feel yourself drawn on to such combinations more and more. But I do
not, you say, know yourself--you. I only know abilities and faculties.
Well, then, teach me yourself--you. I will not insist on the
knowledge--and, in fact, you have not written the R.B. poem yet--your
rays fall obliquely rather than directly straight. I see you only in
your moon. Do tell me all of yourself that you can and will ... before
the R.B. poem comes out. And what is 'Luria'? A poem and not a drama?
I mean, a poem not in the dramatic form? Well! I have wondered at you
sometimes, not for daring, but for bearing to trust your noble works
into the great mill of the 'rank, popular' playhouse, to be ground to
pieces between the teeth of vulgar actors and actresses. I, for one,
would as soon have 'my soul among lions.' 'There is a fascination in
it,' says Miss Mitford, and I am sure there must be, to account for
it. Publics in the mass are bad enough; but to distil the dregs of the
public and baptise oneself in that acrid moisture, where can be the
temptation? I could swear by Shakespeare, as was once sworn 'by those
dead at Marathon,' that I do not see where. I love the drama too. I

look to our old dramatists as to our Kings and princes in poetry. I
love them through all the deeps of their abominations. But the theatre
in those days was a better medium between the people and the poet; and
the press in those days was a less sufficient medium than now. Still,
the poet suffered by the theatre even then; and the reasons are very
obvious.

How true--how true ... is all you say about critics. My convictions
follow you in every word. And I delighted to read your views of the
poet's right aspect towards criticism--I read them with the most
complete appreciation and sympathy. I have sometimes thought that it
would be a curious and instructive process, as illustrative of the
wisdom and apprehensiveness of critics, if anyone would collect the
critical soliloquies of every age touching its own literature, (as far
as such may be extant) and _confer_ them with the literary product of
the said ages. Professor Wilson has begun something of the kind
apparently, in his initiatory paper of the last _Blackwood_ number on
critics, beginning with Dryden--but he seems to have no design in his
notice--it is a mere critique on the critic. And then, he should have
begun earlier than Dryden--earlier even than Sir Philip Sydney, who in
the noble 'Discourse on Poetry,' gives such singular evidence of being
stone-critic-blind to the gods who moved around him. As far as I can
remember, he saw even Shakespeare but indifferently. Oh, it was in his
eyes quite an unillumed age, that period of Elizabeth which _we_ see
full of suns! and few can see what is close to the eyes though they
run their heads against it; the denial of contemporary genius is the
rule rather than the exception. No one counts the eagles in the nest,
till there is a rush of wings; and lo! they are flown. And here we
speak of understanding men, such as the Sydneys and the Drydens. Of
the great body of critics you observe rightly, that they are better
than might be expected of their badness, only the fact of their
_influence_ is no less undeniable than the reason why they should not
be influential. The brazen kettles will be taken for oracles all the
world over. But the influence is for to-day, for this hour--not for
to-morrow and the day after--unless indeed, as you say, the poet do
himself perpetuate the influence by submitting to it. Do you know
Tennyson?--that is, with a face to face knowledge? I have great
admiration for him. In execution, he is exquisite,--and, in music, a
most subtle weigher out to the ear of fine airs. That such a poet
should submit blindly to the suggestions of his critics, (I do not say
that suggestions from without may not be accepted with discrimination
sometimes, to the benefit of the acceptor), blindly and implicitly to
the suggestions of his critics, is much as if Babbage were to take my
opinion and undo his calculating machine by it. Napoleon called poetry
_science creuse_--which, although he was not scientific in poetry
himself, is true enough. But anybody is qualified, according to
everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chymistry
and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and the polka. But
then these are more serious things.

Yes--and it does delight me to hear of your garden full of roses and
soul full of comforts! You have the right to both--you have the key to
both. You have written enough to live by, though only beginning to
write, as you say of yourself. And this reminds me to remind you that
when I talked of coveting most the authorship of your 'Pippa,' I did
not mean to call it your finest work (you might reproach me for
_that_), but just to express a personal feeling. Do you know what it
is to covet your neighbour's poetry?--not his fame, but his poetry?--I
dare say not. You are too generous. And, in fact, beauty is beauty,
and, whether it comes by our own hand or another's, blessed be the
coming of it! _I_, besides, feel _that_. And yet--and yet, I have been
aware of a feeling within me which has spoken two or three times to
the effect of a wish, that I had been visited with the vision of
'Pippa,' before you--and _confiteor tibi_--I confess the baseness of
it. The conception is, to my mind, most exquisite and altogether
original--and the contrast in the working out of the plan, singularly
expressive of various faculty.

Is the poem under your thumb, emerging from it? and in what metre? May
I ask such questions?

And does Mr. Carlyle tell you that he has forbidden all 'singing' to
this perverse and froward generation, which should work and not sing?
And have you told Mr. Carlyle that song is work, and also the
condition of work? I am a devout sitter at his feet--and it is an
effort to me to think him wrong in anything--and once when he told me
to write prose and not verse, I fancied that his opinion was I had
mistaken my calling,--a fancy which in infinite kindness and
gentleness he stooped immediately to correct. I never shall forget the
grace of that kindness--but then! For _him_ to have thought ill of
_me_, would not have been strange--I often think ill of myself, as God
knows. But for Carlyle to think of putting away, even for a season,
the poetry of the world, was wonderful, and has left me ruffled in my
thoughts ever since. I do not know him personally at all. But as his
disciple I ventured (by an exceptional motive) to send him my poems,
and I heard from him as a consequence. 'Dear and noble' he is
indeed--and a poet unaware of himself; all but the sense of music. You
feel it so--do you not? And the 'dear sir' has let him have the
'letter of Cromwell,' I hope; and satisfied 'the obedient servant.'
The curious thing in this world is not the stupidity, but the
upper-handism of the stupidity. The geese are in the Capitol, and the
Romans in the farmyard--and it seems all quite natural that it should
be so, both to geese and Romans!

But there are things you say, which seem to me supernatural, for
reasons which I know and for reasons which I don't know. You will let
me be grateful to you,--will you not? You must, if you will or not.
And also--I would not wait for more leave--if I could but see your
desk--as I do your death's heads and the spider-webs appertaining; but
the soul of Cornelius Agrippa fades from me.

Ever faithfully yours,

ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Wednesday Morning--Spring!
[Post-mark, February 26, 1845.]

Real warm Spring, dear Miss Barrett, and the birds know it; and in
Spring I shall see you, surely see you--for when did I once fail to
get whatever I had set my heart upon? As I ask myself sometimes, with
a strange fear.

I took up this paper to write a great deal--now, I don't think I shall
write much--'I shall see you,' I say!

That 'Luria' you enquire about, shall be my last play--for it is but a
play, woe's me! I have one done here, 'A Soul's Tragedy,' as it is
properly enough called, but _that_ would not do to end with (end I
will), and Luria is a Moor, of Othello's country, and devotes himself
to something he thinks Florence, and the old fortune follows--all in
my brain yet, but the bright weather helps and I will soon loosen my
Braccio and Puccio (a pale discontented man), and Tiburzio (the Pisan,
good true fellow, this one), and Domizia the Lady--loosen all these on
dear foolish (ravishing must his folly be), golden-hearted Luria, all
these with their worldly-wisdom and Tuscan shrewd ways; and, for me,
the misfortune is, I sympathise just as much with these as with
him,--so there can no good come of keeping this wild company any
longer, and 'Luria' and the other sadder ruin of one Chiappino--these
got rid of, I will do as you bid me, and--say first I have some
Romances and Lyrics, all dramatic, to dispatch, and _then_, I shall
stoop of a sudden under and out of this dancing ring of men and women
hand in hand, and stand still awhile, should my eyes dazzle, and when
that's over, they will be gone and you will be there, _pas vrai_? For,
as I think I told you, I always shiver involuntarily when I look--no,
glance--at this First Poem of mine to be. '_Now_,' I call it, what,
upon my soul,--for a solemn matter it is,--what is to be done _now_,
believed _now_, so far as it has been revealed to me--solemn words,
truly--and to find myself writing them to any one else! Enough now.

I know Tennyson 'face to face,'--no more than that. I know Carlyle and
love him--know him so well, that I would have told you he had shaken
that grand head of his at 'singing,' so thoroughly does he love and
live by it. When I last saw him, a fortnight ago, he turned, from I
don't know what other talk, quite abruptly on me with, 'Did you never
try to write a _Song_? Of all things in the world, _that_ I should be
proudest to do.' Then came his definition of a song--then, with an
appealing look to Mrs. C., 'I always say that some day in _spite of
nature and my stars_, I shall burst into a song' (he is not
mechanically 'musical,' he meant, and the music is the poetry, he
holds, and should enwrap the thought as Donne says 'an amber-drop
enwraps a bee'), and then he began to recite an old Scotch song,
stopping at the first rude couplet, 'The beginning words are merely to
set the tune, they tell me'--and then again at the couplet about--or,
to the effect that--'give me' (but in broad Scotch) 'give me but my
lass, I care not for my cogie.' '_He says_,' quoth Carlyle
magisterially, 'that if you allow him the love of his lass, you may
take away all else, even his cogie, his cup or can, and he cares not,'
just as a professor expounds Lycophron. And just before I left
England, six months ago, did not I hear him croon, if not certainly
sing, 'Charlie is my darling' ('my _darling_' with an adoring
emphasis), and then he stood back, as it were, from the song, to look
at it better, and said 'How must that notion of ideal wondrous
perfection have impressed itself in this old Jacobite's "young
Cavalier"--("They go to save their land, and the _young
Cavalier_!!")--when I who care nothing about such a rag of a man,
cannot but feel as he felt, in speaking his words after him!' After
saying which, he would be sure to counsel everybody to get their heads
clear of all singing! Don't let me forget to clap hands, we got the
letter, dearly bought as it was by the 'Dear Sirs,' &c., and
insignificant scrap as it proved, but still it is got, to my
encouragement in diplomacy.

Who told you of my sculls and spider webs--Horne? Last year I petted
extraordinarily a fine fellow, (a _garden_ spider--there was the
singularity,--the thin clever-even-for-a-spider-sort, and they are
_so_ 'spirited and sly,' all of them--this kind makes a long cone of
web, with a square chamber of vantage at the end, and there he sits
loosely and looks about), a great fellow that housed himself, with
real gusto, in the jaws of a great scull, whence he watched me as I
wrote, and I remember speaking to Horne about his good points.
Phrenologists look gravely at that great scull, by the way, and hope,
in their grim manner, that its owner made a good end. He looks
quietly, now, out at the green little hill behind. I have no little
insight to the feelings of furniture, and treat books and prints with
a reasonable consideration. How some people use their pictures, for
instance, is a mystery to me; very revolting all the same--portraits
obliged to face each other for ever,--prints put together in
portfolios. My Polidoro's perfect Andromeda along with 'Boors
Carousing,' by Ostade,--where I found her,--my own father's doing, or
I would say more.

And when I have said I like 'Pippa' better than anything else I have
done yet, I shall have answered all you bade me. And now may _I_
begin questioning? No,--for it is all a pure delight to me, so that
you do but write. I never was without good, kind, generous friends and
lovers, so they say--so they were and are,--perhaps they came at the
wrong time--I never wanted them--though that makes no difference in my
gratitude I trust,--but I know myself--surely--and always have done
so, for is there not somewhere the little book I first printed when a
boy, with John Mill, the metaphysical head, _his_ marginal note that
'the writer possesses a deeper self-consciousness than I ever knew in
a sane human being.' So I never deceived myself much, nor called my
feelings for people other than they were. And who has a right to say,
if I have not, that I had, but I said that, supernatural or no. Pray
tell me, too, of your present doings and projects, and never write
yourself 'grateful' to me, who _am_ grateful, very grateful to
you,--for none of your words but I take in earnest--and tell me if
Spring _be not_ coming, come, and I will take to writing the gravest
of letters, because this beginning is for gladness' sake, like
Carlyle's song couplet. My head aches a little to-day too, and, as
poor dear Kirke White said to the moon, from his heap of mathematical
papers,

'I throw aside the learned sheet;
I cannot choose but gaze, she looks so--mildly sweet.'

Out on the foolish phrase, but there's hard rhyming without it.

Ever yours faithfully,

ROBERT BROWNING.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

50 Wimpole Street: Feb. 27, 1845.

Yes, but, dear Mr. Browning, I want the spring according to the new
'style' (mine), and not the old one of you and the rest of the poets.
To me unhappily, the snowdrop is much the same as the snow--it feels
as cold underfoot--and I have grown sceptical about 'the voice of the
turtle,' the east winds blow so loud. April is a Parthian with a dart,
and May (at least the early part of it) a spy in the camp. _That_ is
my idea of what you call spring; mine, in the _new style_! A little
later comes my spring; and indeed after such severe weather, from
which I have just escaped with my life, I may thank it for coming at
all. How happy you are, to be able to listen to the 'birds' without
the commentary of the east wind, which, like other commentaries,
spoils the music. And how happy I am to listen to you, when you write
such kind open-hearted letters to me! I am delighted to hear all you
say to me of yourself, and 'Luria,' and the spider, and to do him no
dishonour in the association, of the great teacher of the age,
Carlyle, who is also yours and mine. He fills the office of a
poet--does he not?--by analysing humanity back into its elements, to
the destruction of the conventions of the hour. That is--strictly
speaking--the office of the poet, is it not?--and he discharges it
fully, and with a wider intelligibility perhaps as far as the
contemporary period is concerned, than if he did forthwith 'burst into
a song.'

But how I do wander!--I meant to say, and I will call myself back to
say, that spring will really come some day I hope and believe, and the
warm settled weather with it, and that then I shall be probably fitter
for certain pleasures than I can appear even to myself now.

And, in the meantime, I seem to see 'Luria' instead of you; I have
visions and dream dreams. And the 'Soul's Tragedy,' which sounds to me
like the step of a ghost of an old Drama! and you are not to think
that I blaspheme the Drama, dear Mr. Browning; or that I ever thought
of exhorting you to give up the 'solemn robes' and tread of the
buskin. It is the theatre which vulgarises these things; the modern
theatre in which we see no altar! where the thymel� is replaced by the
caprice of a popular actor. And also, I have a fancy that your great
dramatic power would work more clearly and audibly in the less
definite mould--but you ride your own faculty as Oceanus did his
sea-horse, 'directing it by your will'; and woe to the impertinence,
which would dare to say 'turn this way' or 'turn from that way'--it
should not be _my_ impertinence. Do not think I blaspheme the Drama. I
have gone through 'all such reading as should never be read' (that is,
by women!), through my love of it on the contrary. And the dramatic
faculty is strong in you--and therefore, as 'I speak unto a wise man,
judge what I say.'

For myself and my own doings, you shall hear directly what I have been
doing, and what I am about to do. Some years ago, as perhaps you may
have heard, (but I hope not, for the fewer who hear of it the
better)--some years ago, I translated or rather _undid_ into English,
the 'Prometheus' of �schylus. To speak of this production moderately
(not modestly), it is the most miserable of all miserable versions of
the class. It was completed (in the first place) in thirteen days--the
iambics thrown into blank verse, the lyrics into rhymed octosyllabics
and the like,--and the whole together as cold as Caucasus, and as flat
as the nearest plain. To account for this, the haste may be something;
but if my mind had been properly awakened at the time, I might have
made still more haste and done it better. Well,--the comfort is, that
the little book was unadvertised and unknown, and that most of the
copies (through my entreaty of my father) are shut up in the wardrobe
of his bedroom. If ever I get well I shall show my joy by making a
bonfire of them. In the meantime, the recollection of this sin of mine
has been my nightmare and daymare too, and the sin has been the 'Blot
on my escutcheon.' I could look in nobody's face, with a 'Thou canst
not say I did it'--I know, I did it. And so I resolved to wash away
the transgression, and translate the tragedy over again. It was an
honest straightforward proof of repentance--was it not? and I have
completed it, except the transcription and last polishing. If
�schylus stands at the foot of my bed now, I shall have a little
breath to front him. I have done my duty by him, not indeed according
to his claims, but in proportion to my faculty. Whether I shall ever
publish or not (remember) remains to be considered--that is a
different side of the subject. If I do, it _may_ be in a
magazine--or--but this is another ground. And then, I have in my head
to associate with the version, a monodrama of my own,--not a long
poem, but a monologue of �schylus as he sate a blind exile on the
flats of Sicily and recounted the past to his own soul, just before
the eagle cracked his great massy skull with a stone.

But my chief _intention_ just now is the writing of a sort of
novel-poem--a poem as completely modern as 'Geraldine's Courtship,'
running into the midst of our conventions, and rushing into
drawing-rooms and the like, 'where angels fear to tread'; and so,
meeting face to face and without mask the Humanity of the age, and
speaking the truth as I conceive of it out plainly. That is my
intention. It is not mature enough yet to be called a plan. I am
waiting for a story, and I won't take one, because I want to make one,
and I like to make my own stories, because then I can take liberties
with them in the treatment.

Who told me of your skulls and spiders? Why, couldn't I know it
without being told? Did Cornelius Agrippa know nothing without being
told? Mr. Horne never spoke it to my ears--(I never saw him face to
face in my life, although we have corresponded for long and long), and
he never wrote it to my eyes. Perhaps he does not know that I know it.
Well, then! if I were to say that _I heard it from you yourself_, how
would you answer? _And it was so._ Why, are you not aware that these
are the days of mesmerism and clairvoyance? Are you an infidel? I have
believed in your skulls for the last year, for my part.

And I have some sympathy in your habit of feeling for chairs and
tables. I remember, when I was a child and wrote poems in little
clasped books, I used to kiss the books and put them away tenderly
because I had been happy near them, and take them out by turns when I
was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the
pleasure of the new place. This, not for the sake of the verses
written in them, and not for the sake of writing more verses in them,
but from pure gratitude. Other books I used to treat in a like
manner--and to talk to the trees and the flowers, was a natural
inclination--but between me and that time, the cypresses grow thick
and dark.

Is it true that your wishes fulfil themselves? And when they _do_, are
they not bitter to your taste--do you not wish them _un_fulfilled? Oh,
this life, this life! There is comfort in it, they say, and I almost
believe--but the brightest place in the house, is the leaning out of
the window--at least, for me.

Of course you are _self-conscious_--How could you be a poet otherwise?
Tell me.

Ever faithfully yours,

E.B.B.

And was the little book written with Mr. Mill, pure metaphysics, or
what?

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Saturday Night, March 1 [1845].

Dear Miss Barrett,--I seem to find of a sudden--surely I knew
before--anyhow, I _do_ find now, that with the octaves on octaves of
quite new golden strings you enlarged the compass of my life's harp
with, there is added, too, such a tragic chord, that which you
touched, so gently, in the beginning of your letter I got this
morning, 'just escaping' &c. But if my truest heart's wishes avail, as
they have hitherto done, you shall laugh at East winds yet, as I do!
See now, this sad feeling is so strange to me, that I must write it
out, _must_, and you might give me great, the greatest pleasure for
years and yet find me as passive as a stone used to wine libations,
and as ready in expressing my sense of them, but when I am pained, I
find the old theory of the uselessness of communicating the
circumstances of it, singularly untenable. I have been 'spoiled' in
this world--to such an extent, indeed, that I often _reason_ out--make
clear to myself--that I might very properly, so far as myself am
concerned, take any step that would peril the whole of my future
happiness--because the past is gained, secure, and on record; and,
though not another of the old days should dawn on me, I shall not have
lost my life, no! Out of all which you are--please--to make a sort of
sense, if you can, so as to express that I have been deeply struck to
find a new real unmistakable sorrow along with these as real but not
so new joys you have given me. How strangely this connects itself in
my mind with another subject in your note! I looked at that
translation for a minute, not longer, years ago, knowing nothing about
it or you, and I _only_ looked to see what rendering a passage had
received that was often in my thoughts.[1] I forget your version (it
was not _yours_, my _'yours' then_; I mean I had no extraordinary
interest about it), but the original makes Prometheus (telling over
his bestowments towards human happiness) say, as something [Greek:
peraiter� t�nde], that he stopped mortals [Greek: m� proderkesthai
moron--to poion eur�n], asks the Chorus, [Greek: t�sde pharmakon
nosou]? Whereto he replies, [Greek: tuphlas en autois elpidas
kat�kisa] (what you hear men dissertate upon by the hour, as proving
the immortality of the soul apart from revelation, undying yearnings,
restless longings, instinctive desires which, unless to be eventually
indulged, it were cruel to plant in us, &c. &c.). But, [Greek: meg'
�phel�ma tout' ed�r�s� brotois]! concludes the chorus, like a sigh
from the admitted Eleusinian �schylus was! You cannot think how this
foolish circumstance struck me this evening, so I thought I would e'en
tell you at once and be done with it. Are you not my dear friend
already, and shall I not use you? And pray you not to 'lean out of the
window' when my own foot is only on the stair; do wait a little for

Yours _ever_,

R.B.

[Footnote 1: The following is the version of the passage in Mrs.
Browning's later translation of the 'Prometheus' (II. 247-251 of the
original):

_Prom._ I did restrain besides
My mortals from premeditating death.

_Cho._ How didst thou medicine the plague-fear of death?

_Prom._ I set blind hopes to inhabit in their house.

_Cho._ By that gift thou didst help thy mortals well.]

_E.B.B. to R.B._

March 5, 1845.

But I did not mean to strike a 'tragic chord'; indeed I did not!
Sometimes one's melancholy will be uppermost and sometimes one's
mirth,--the world goes round, you know--and I suppose that in that
letter of mine the melancholy took the turn. As to 'escaping with my
life,' it was just a phrase--at least it did not signify more than
that the sense of mortality, and discomfort of it, is peculiarly
strong with me when east winds are blowing and waters freezing. For
the rest, I am _essentially better_, and have been for several
winters; and I feel as if it were intended for me to live and not die,
and I am reconciled to the feeling. Yes! I am satisfied to 'take up'
with the blind hopes again, and have them in the house with me, for
all that I sit by the window. By the way, did the chorus utter scorn
in the [Greek: meg' �phel�ma]. I think not. It is well to fly towards
the light, even where there may be some fluttering and bruising of
wings against the windowpanes, is it not?

There is an obscurer passage, on which I covet your thoughts, where
Prometheus, after the sublime declaration that, with a full knowledge
of the penalty reserved for him, he had sinned of free will and
choice--goes on to say--or to seem to say--that he had _not_, however,
foreseen the extent and detail of the torment, the skiey rocks, and
the friendless desolation. See v. 275. The intention of the poet
might have been to magnify to his audience the torment of the
martyrdom--but the heroism of the martyr diminishes in proportion--and
there appears to be a contradiction, and oversight. Or is my view
wrong? Tell me. And tell me too, if �schylus not the divinest of all
the divine Greek souls? People say after Quintilian, that he is savage
and rude; a sort of poetic Orson, with his locks all wild. But I will
not hear it of my master! He is strong as Zeus is--and not as a
boxer--and tender as Power itself, which always is tenderest.

But to go back to the view of Life with the blind Hopes; you are not
to think--whatever I may have written or implied--that I lean either
to the philosophy or affectation which beholds the world through
darkness instead of light, and speaks of it wailingly. Now, may God
forbid that it should be so with me. I am not desponding by nature,
and after a course of bitter mental discipline and long bodily
seclusion, I come out with two learnt lessons (as I sometimes say and
oftener feel),--the wisdom of cheerfulness--and the duty of social
intercourse. Anguish has instructed me in joy, and solitude in
society; it has been a wholesome and not unnatural reaction. And
altogether, I may say that the earth looks the brighter to me in
proportion to my own deprivations. The laburnum trees and rose trees
are plucked up by the roots--but the sunshine is in their places, and
the root of the sunshine is above the storms. What we call Life is a
condition of the soul, and the soul must improve in happiness and
wisdom, except by its own fault. These tears in our eyes, these
faintings of the flesh, will not hinder such improvement.

And I do like to hear testimonies like yours, to _happiness_, and I
feel it to be a testimony of a higher sort than the obvious one.
Still, it is obvious too that you have been spared, up to this time,
the great natural afflictions, against which we are nearly all called,
sooner or later, to struggle and wrestle--or your step would not be
'on the stair' quite so lightly. And so, we turn to you, dear Mr.
Browning, for comfort and gentle spiriting! Remember that as you owe
your unscathed joy to God, you should pay it back to His world. And I
thank you for some of it already.

Also, writing as from friend to friend--as you say rightly that we
are--I ought to confess that of one class of griefs (which has been
called too the bitterest), I know as little as you. The cruelty of the
world, and the treason of it--the unworthiness of the dearest; of
these griefs I have scanty knowledge. It seems to me from my personal
experience that there is kindness everywhere in different proportions,
and more goodness and tenderheartedness than we read of in the
moralists. People have been kind to _me_, even without understanding
me, and pitiful to me, without approving of me:--nay, have not the
very critics tamed their beardom for me, and roared delicately as
sucking doves, on behalf of me? I have no harm to say of your world,
though I am not of it, as you see. And I have the cream of it in your
friendship, and a little more, and I do not envy much the milkers of
the cows.

How kind you are!--how kindly and gently you speak to me! Some things
you say are very touching, and some, surprising; and although I am
aware that you unconsciously exaggerate what I can be to you, yet it
is delightful to be broad awake and think of you as my friend.

May God bless you!

Faithfully yours,

ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Tuesday Morning.
[Post-mark, March 12, 1845.]

Your letter made me so happy, dear Miss Barrett, that I have kept
quiet this while; is it too great a shame if I begin to want more
good news of you, and to say so? Because there has been a bitter wind
ever since. Will you grant me a great favour? Always when you write,
though about your own works, not Greek plays merely, put me in,
_always_, a little official bulletin-line that shall say 'I am better'
or 'still better,' will you? That is done, then--and now, what do I
wish to tell you first? The poem you propose to make, for the times;
the fearless fresh living work you describe, is the _only_ Poem to be
undertaken now by you or anyone that _is_ a Poet at all; the only
reality, only effective piece of service to be rendered God and man;
it is what I have been all my life intending to do, and now shall be
much, much nearer doing, since you will along with me. And you _can_
do it, I know and am sure--so sure, that I could find in my heart to
be jealous of your stopping in the way even to translate the
Prometheus; though the accompanying monologue will make amends too. Or
shall I set you a task I meant for myself once upon a time?--which,
oh, how you would fulfil! Restore the Prometheus [Greek: purphoros] as
Shelley did the [Greek: Lyomenos]; when I say 'restore,' I know, or
very much fear, that the [Greek: purphoros] was the same with the
[Greek: purkaeus] which, by a fragment, we sorrowfully ascertain to
have been a Satyric Drama; but surely the capabilities of the subject
are much greater than in this, we now wonder at; nay, they include all
those of this last--for just see how magnificently the story unrolls
itself. The beginning of Jupiter's dynasty, the calm in Heaven after
the storm, the ascending--(stop, I will get the book and give the
words), [Greek: op�s tachista ton patr�on eis thronon kathezet',
euthus daimosin nemei gera alloisin alla--k.t.l.],[1] all the while
Prometheus being the first among the first in honour, as [Greek:
kaitoi theoisi tois neois toutois gera tis allos, � 'g�, pantel�s
di�rise]?[2] then the one black hand-cloudlet storming the joyous
blue and gold everywhere, [Greek: brot�n de t�n talaip�r�n logon ouk
eschen oudena],[3] and the design of Zeus to blot out the whole race,
and plant a new one. And Prometheus with his grand solitary [Greek:
eg� d' etolm�sa],[4] and his saving them, as the _first_ good, from
annihilation. Then comes the darkening brow of Zeus, and estrangement
from the benign circle of grateful gods, and the dissuasion of old
confederates, and all the Right that one may fancy in Might, the
strongest reasons [Greek: pauesthai tropou philanthr�pou][5] coming
from the own mind of the Titan, if you will, and all the while he
shall be proceeding steadily in the alleviation of the sufferings of
mortals whom, [Greek: n�pious ontas to prin, ennous kai phren�n
ep�bolous eth�ke],[6] while still, in proportion, shall the doom he is
about to draw on himself, manifest itself more and more distinctly,
till at the last, he shall achieve the salvation of man, body (by the
gift of fire) and soul (by even those [Greek: tuphlai elpides],[7]
hopes of immortality), and so having rendered him utterly, according
to the mythos here, _independent_ of Jove--for observe, Prometheus in
the play never talks of helping mortals more, of fearing for them
more, of even benefiting them more by his sufferings. The rest is
between Jove and himself; he will reveal the master-secret to Jove
when he shall have released him, &c. There is no stipulation that the
gifts to mortals shall be continued; indeed, by the fact that it is
Prometheus who hangs on Caucasus while 'the ephemerals possess fire,'
one sees that somehow mysteriously _they_ are past Jove's harming now.
Well, this wholly achieved, the price is as wholly accepted, and off
into the darkness passes in calm triumphant grandeur the Titan, with
Strength and Violence, and Vulcan's silent and downcast eyes, and then
the gold clouds and renewed flushings of felicity shut up the scene
again, with Might in his old throne again, yet with a new element of
mistrust, and conscious shame, and fear, that writes significantly
enough above all the glory and rejoicing that all is not as it was,
nor will ever be. Such might be the framework of your Drama, just what
cannot help striking one at first glance, and would not such a Drama
go well before your translation? Do think of this and tell me--it
nearly writes itself. You see, I meant the [Greek: meg' �phel�ma][8]
to be a deep great truth; if there were no life beyond this, I think
the hope in one would be an incalculable blessing _for_ this life,
which is melancholy for one like �schylus to feel, if he could _only_
hope, because the argument as to the ulterior good of those hopes is
cut clean away, and what had he left?

I do not find it take away from my feeling of the magnanimity of
Prometheus that he should, in truth, complain (as he does from
beginning to end) of what he finds himself suffering. He could have
prevented all, and can stop it now--of that he never thinks for a
moment. That was the old Greek way--they never let an antagonistic
passion neutralise the other which was to influence the man to his
praise or blame. A Greek hero fears exceedingly and battles it out,
cries out when he is wounded and fights on, does not say his love or
hate makes him see no danger or feel no pain. �schylus from first word
to last ([Greek: idesthe me, oia pasch�][9] to [Greek: esoras me, h�s
ekdika pasch�][10]) insists on the unmitigated reality of the
punishment which only the sun, and divine ether, and the godhead of
his mother can comprehend; still, still that is only what I suppose
�schylus to have done--in your poem you shall make Prometheus our way.

And now enough of Greek, which I am fast forgetting (for I never look
at books I loved once)--it was your mention of the translation that
brought out the old fast fading outlines of the Poem in my brain--the
Greek poem, that is. You think--for I must get to _you_--that I
'unconsciously exaggerate what you are to me.' Now, you don't know
what _that_ is, nor can I very well tell you, because the language
with which I talk to myself of these matters is spiritual Attic, and
'loves contractions,' as grammarians say; but I read it myself, and
well know what it means, that's why I told you I was self-conscious--I
meant that I never yet mistook my own feelings, one for
another--there! Of what use is talking? Only do you stay here with me
in the 'House' these few short years. Do you think I shall see you in
two months, three months? I may travel, perhaps. So you have got to
like society, and would enjoy it, you think? For me, I always hated
it--have put up with it these six or seven years past, lest by
foregoing it I should let some unknown good escape me, in the true
time of it, and only discover my fault when too late; and now that I
have done most of what is to be done, _any_ lodge in a garden of
cucumbers for me! I don't even care about reading now--the world, and
pictures of it, rather than writings about the world! But you must
read books in order to get words and forms for 'the public' if you
_write_, and _that_ you needs must do, if you fear God. I have no
pleasure in writing myself--none, in the mere act--though all pleasure
in the sense of fulfilling a duty, whence, if I have done my real
best, judge how heart-breaking a matter must it be to be pronounced a
poor creature by critic this and acquaintance the other! But I think
you like the operation of writing as I should like that of painting or
making music, do you not? After all, there is a great delight in the
heart of the thing; and use and forethought have made me ready at all
times to set to work--but--I don't know why--my heart sinks whenever I
open this desk, and rises when I shut it. Yet but for what I have
written you would never have heard of me--and _through_ what you have
written, not properly _for_ it, I love and wish you well! Now, will
you remember what I began my letter by saying--how you have promised
to let me know if my wishing takes effect, and if you still continue
better? And not even ... (since we are learned in magnanimity) don't
even tell me that or anything else, if it teases you,--but wait your
own good time, and know me for ... if these words were but my own, and
fresh-minted for this moment's use!...

Yours ever faithfully,

R. BROWNING.

[Footnote 1: Aeschylus, _Prometheus_, 228ff.:

'When at first
He filled his father's throne, he instantly
Made various gifts of glory to the gods.']

[Footnote 2: _Ib._ 439, 440:

'For see--their honours to these new-made gods,
What other gave but I?']

[Footnote 3: _Ib._ 231, 232:

'Alone of men,
Of miserable men, he took no count.']

[Footnote 4: _Ib._ 235: 'But I dared it.']

[Footnote 5: _Ib._ 11: 'Leave off his old trick of loving man.']

[Footnote 6: _Ib._ 443, 444:

'Being fools before,
I made them wise and true in aim of soul.']

[Footnote 7: _Ib._ 250: 'Blind hopes.']

[Footnote 8: _Ib._ 251: 'A great benefit.']

[Footnote 9: _Ib._ 92: 'Behold what I suffer.']

[Footnote 10: _Ib._ 1093: 'Dost see how I suffer this wrong?']

_E.B.B. to R.B._

50 Wimpole Street: March 20, 1845.

Whenever I delay to write to you, dear Mr. Browning, it is not, be
sure, that I take my 'own good time,' but submit to my own bad time.
It was kind of you to wish to know how I was, and not unkind of me to
suspend my answer to your question--for indeed I have not been very
well, nor have had much heart for saying so. This implacable weather!
this east wind that seems to blow through the sun and moon! who can be
well in such a wind? Yet for me, I should not grumble. There has been
nothing very bad the matter with me, as there used to be--I only grow
weaker than usual, and learn my lesson of being mortal, in a
corner--and then all this must end! April is coming. There will be
both a May and a June if we live to see such things, and perhaps,
after all, we may. And as to seeing _you_ besides, I observe that you
distrust me, and that perhaps you penetrate my morbidity and guess how
when the moment comes to see a living human face to which I am not
accustomed, I shrink and grow pale in the spirit. Do you? You are
learned in human nature, and you know the consequences of leading such
a secluded life as mine--notwithstanding all my fine philosophy about
social duties and the like--well--if you have such knowledge or if you
have it not, I cannot say, but I do say that I will indeed see you
when the warm weather has revived me a little, and put the earth 'to
rights' again so as to make pleasures of the sort possible. For if you
think that I shall not _like_ to see you, you are wrong, for all your
learning. But I shall be afraid of you at first--though I am not, in
writing thus. You are Paracelsus, and I am a recluse, with nerves that
have been all broken on the rack, and now hang loosely--quivering at a
step and breath.

And what you say of society draws me on to many comparative thoughts
of your life and mine. You seem to have drunken of the cup of life
full, with the sun shining on it. I have lived only inwardly; or with
_sorrow_, for a strong emotion. Before this seclusion of my illness, I
was secluded still, and there are few of the youngest women in the
world who have not seen more, heard more, known more, of society, than
I, who am scarcely to be called young now. I grew up in the
country--had no social opportunities, had my heart in books and
poetry, and my experience in reveries. My sympathies drooped towards
the ground like an untrained honeysuckle--and but for _one_, in my own
house--but of this I cannot speak. It was a lonely life, growing green
like the grass around it. Books and dreams were what I lived in--and
domestic life only seemed to buzz gently around, like the bees about
the grass. And so time passed, and passed--and afterwards, when my
illness came and I seemed to stand at the edge of the world with all
done, and no prospect (as appeared at one time) of ever passing the
threshold of one room again; why then, I turned to thinking with some
bitterness (after the greatest sorrow of my life had given me room and
time to breathe) that I had stood blind in this temple I was about to
leave--that I had seen no Human nature, that my brothers and sisters
of the earth were _names_ to me, that I had beheld no great mountain
or river, nothing in fact. I was as a man dying who had not read
Shakespeare, and it was too late! do you understand? And do you also
know what a disadvantage this ignorance is to my art? Why, if I live
on and yet do not escape from this seclusion, do you not perceive that
I labour under signal disadvantages--that I am, in a manner, as a
_blind poet_? Certainly, there is a compensation to a degree. I have
had much of the inner life, and from the habit of self-consciousness
and self-analysis, I make great guesses at Human nature in the main.
But how willingly I would as a poet exchange some of this lumbering,
ponderous, helpless knowledge of books, for some experience of life
and man, for some....

But all grumbling is a vile thing. We should all thank God for our
measures of life, and think them enough for each of us. I write so,
that you may not mistake what I wrote before in relation to society,
although you do not see from my point of view; and that you may
understand what I mean fully when I say, that I have lived all my
chief _joys_, and indeed nearly all emotions that go warmly by that
name and relate to myself personally, in poetry and in poetry alone.
Like to write? Of course, of course I do. I seem to live while I
write--it is life, for me. Why, what is to live? Not to eat and drink
and breathe,--but to feel the life in you down all the fibres of
being, passionately and joyfully. And thus, one lives in composition
surely--not always--but when the wheel goes round and the procession
is uninterrupted. Is it not so with you? oh--it must be so. For the
rest, there will be necessarily a reaction; and, in my own particular
case, whenever I see a poem of mine in print, or even smoothly
transcribed, the reaction is most painful. The pleasure, the sense of
power, without which I could not write a line, is gone in a moment;
and nothing remains but disappointment and humiliation. I never wrote
a poem which you could not persuade me to tear to pieces if you took
me at the right moment! I have a _seasonable_ humility, I do assure
you.

How delightful to talk about oneself; but as you 'tempted me and I did
eat,' I entreat your longsuffering of my sin, and ah! if you would
but sin back so in turn! You and I seem to meet in a mild contrarious
harmony ... as in the 'si no, si no' of an Italian duet. I want to see
more of men, and you have seen too much, you say. I am in ignorance,
and you, in satiety. 'You don't even care about reading now.' Is it
possible? And I am as 'fresh' about reading, as ever I was--as long as
I keep out of the shadow of the dictionaries and of theological
controversies, and the like. Shall I whisper it to you under the
memory of the last rose of last summer? _I am very fond of romances_;
yes! and I read them not only as some wise people are known to do, for
the sake of the eloquence here and the sentiment there, and the
graphic intermixtures here and there, but for the story! just as
little children would, sitting on their papa's knee. My childish love
of a story never wore out with my love of plum cake, and now there is
not a hole in it. I make it a rule, for the most part, to read all the
romances that other people are kind enough to write--and woe to the
miserable wight who tells me how the third volume endeth. Have you in
you any surviving innocence of this sort? or do you call it idiocy? If
you do, I will forgive you, only smiling to myself--I give you
notice,--with a smile of superior pleasure! Mr. Chorley made me quite
laugh the other day by recommending Mary Hewitt's 'Improvisatore,'
with a sort of deprecating reference to the _descriptions_ in the
book, just as if I never read a novel--_I!_ I wrote a confession back
to him which made him shake his head perhaps, and now I confess to
_you_, unprovoked. I am one who could have forgotten the plague,
listening to Boccaccio's stories; and I am not ashamed of it. I do not
even 'see the better part,' I am so silly.

Ah! you tempt me with a grand vision of Prometheus! _I_, who have just
escaped with my life, after treading Milton's ground, you would send
me to �schylus's. No, _I do not dare_. And besides ... I am inclined
to think that we want new _forms_, as well as thoughts. The old gods
are dethroned. Why should we go back to the antique moulds, classical
moulds, as they are so improperly called? If it is a necessity of Art
to do so, why then those critics are right who hold that Art is
exhausted and the world too worn out for poetry. I do not, for my
part, believe this: and I believe the so-called necessity of Art to be
the mere feebleness of the artist. Let us all aspire rather to _Life_,
and let the dead bury their dead. If we have but courage to face these
conventions, to touch this low ground, we shall take strength from it
instead of losing it; and of that, I am intimately persuaded. For
there is poetry _everywhere_; the 'treasure' (see the old fable) lies
all over the field. And then Christianity is a worthy _myth_, and
poetically acceptable.

I had much to say to you, or at least something, of the 'blind hopes'
&c., but am ashamed to take a step into a new sheet. If you mean 'to
travel,' why, I shall have to miss you. Do you really mean it? How is
the play going on? and the poem?

May God bless you!

Ever and truly yours,

E.B.B.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Monday Morning.
[Post-mark, March 31, 1845.]

When you read Don Quixote, my dear romance-reader, do you ever notice
that flower of an incident of good fellowship where the friendly
Squire of Him of the Moon, or the Looking glasses, (I forget which)
passes to Sancho's dry lips, (all under a cork-tree one morning)--a
plump wine-skin,--and do you admire dear brave Miguel's knowledge of
thirsty nature when he tells you that the Drinker, having seriously
considered for a space the Pleiads, or place where they should be,
fell, as he slowly returned the shrivelled bottle to its donor, into a
deep musing of an hour's length, or thereabouts, and then ... mark ...
only _then_, fetching a profound sigh, broke silence with ... such a
piece of praise as turns pale the labours in that way of Rabelais and
the Teian (if he wasn't a Byzantine monk, alas!) and our Mr. Kenyon's
stately self--(since my own especial poet _� moi_, that can do all
with anybody, only 'sips like a fly,' she says, and so cares not to
compete with these behemoths that drink up Jordan)--Well, then ...
(oh, I must get quick to the sentence's end, and be brief as an
oracle-explainer!)--the giver is you and the taker is I, and the
letter is the wine, and the star-gazing is the reading the same, and
the brown study is--how shall I deserve and be grateful enough to this
new strange friend of my own, that has taken away my reproach among
men, that have each and all their friend, so they say (... not that I
believe all they say--they boast too soon sometimes, no doubt,--I once
was shown a letter wherein the truth stumbled out after this fashion
'Dere Smith,--I calls you "_dere_" ... because you are so in your
shop!')--and the great sigh is,--there is no deserving nor being
grateful at all,--and the breaking silence is, and the praise is ...
ah, there, enough of it! This sunny morning is as if I wished it for
you--10 strikes by the clock now--tell me if at 10 this morning you
feel any good from my heart's wishes for you--I would give you all you
want out of my own life and gladness and yet keep twice the stock that
should by right have sufficed the thin white face that is laughing at
me in the glass yonder at the fancy of its making anyone afraid ...
and now, with another kind of laugh, at the thought that when its
owner 'travels' next, he will leave off Miss Barrett along with port
wine--_Dii meliora piis_, and, among them to

Yours every where, and at all times yours

R. BROWNING.

I have all to say yet--next letter. R.B.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Tuesday Night.
[Post-mark, April 16, 1845.]

I heard of you, dear Miss Barrett, between a Polka and a Cellarius the
other evening, of Mr. Kenyon--how this wind must hurt you! And
yesterday I had occasion to go your way--past, that is, Wimpole
Street, the end of it,--and, do you know, I did not seem to have leave
from you to go down it yet, much less count number after number till I
came to yours,--much least than less, look up when I did come there.
So I went on to a viperine she-friend of mine who, I think, rather
loves me she does so hate me, and we talked over the chances of
certain other friends who were to be balloted for at the 'Athen�um'
last night,--one of whom, it seems, was in a fright about it--'to such
little purpose' said my friend--'for he is so inoffensive--now, if one
were to style _you_ that--' 'Or you'--I said--and so we hugged
ourselves in our grimness like tiger-cats. Then there is a deal in the
papers to-day about Maynooth, and a meeting presided over by Lord
Mayor Gibbs, and the Reverend Mr. Somebody's speech. And Mrs. Norton
has gone and book-made at a great rate about the Prince of Wales,
pleasantly putting off till his time all that used of old to be put
off till his mother's time;--altogether, I should dearly like to hear
from you, but not till the wind goes, and sun comes--because I shall
see Mr. Kenyon next week and get him to tell me some more. By the way,
do you suppose anybody else looks like him? If you do, the first room
full of real London people you go among you will fancy to be lighted
up by a saucer of burning salt and spirits of wine in the back ground.

Monday--last night when I could do nothing else I began to write to
you, such writing as you have seen--strange! The proper time and
season for good sound sensible and profitable forms of speech--when
ought it to have occurred, and how did I evade it in these letters of
mine? For people begin with a graceful skittish levity, lest you
should be struck all of a heap with what is to come, and _that_ is
sure to be the stuff and staple of the man, full of wisdom and
sorrow,--and then again comes the fringe of reeds and pink little
stones on the other side, that you may put foot on land, and draw
breath, and think what a deep pond you have swum across. But _you_ are
the real deep wonder of a creature,--and I sail these paper-boats on
you rather impudently. But I always mean to be very grave one
day,--when I am in better spirits and can go _fuori di me_.

And one thing I want to persuade you of, which is, that all you gain
by travel is the discovery that you have gained nothing, and have done
rightly in trusting to your innate ideas--or not rightly in
distrusting them, as the case may be. You get, too, a little ...
perhaps a considerable, good, in finding the world's accepted _moulds_
everywhere, into which you may run and fix your own fused metal,--but
not a grain Troy-weight do you get of new gold, silver or brass. After
this, you go boldly on your own resources, and are justified to
yourself, that's all. Three scratches with a pen,[1] even with this
pen,--and you have the green little Syrenusa where I have sate and
heard the quails sing. One of these days I shall describe a country I
have seen in my soul only, fruits, flowers, birds and all.

Ever yours, dear Miss Barrett,

R. BROWNING.

[Footnote 1: A rough sketch follows in the original.]

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Thursday Morning.
[Post-mark, April 18, 1845.]

If you did but know dear Mr. Browning how often I have written ... not
this letter I am about to write, but another better letter to you, ...
in the midst of my silence, ... you would not think for a moment that
the east wind, with all the harm it does to me, is able to do the
great harm of putting out the light of the thought of you to my mind;
for this, indeed, it has no power to do. I had the pen in my hand once
to write; and why it fell out, I cannot tell you. And you see, ... all
your writing will not change the wind! You wished all manner of good
to me one day as the clock struck ten; yes, and I assure you I was
better that day--and I must not forget to tell you so though it is so
long since. And _therefore_, I was logically bound to believe that you
had never thought of me since ... unless you thought east winds of me!
_That_ was quite clear; was it not? or would have been; if it had not
been for the supernatural conviction, I had above all, of your
kindness, which was too large to be taken in the hinge of a syllogism.
In fact I have long left off thinking that logic proves anything--it
_doesn't_, you know.

But your Lamia has taught you some subtle 'viperine' reasoning and
_motiving_, for the turning down one street instead of another. It was
conclusive.

Ah--but you will never persuade me that I am the better, or as well,
for the thing that I have not. We look from different points of view,
and yours is the point of attainment. Not that you do not truly say
that, when all is done, we must come home to place our engines, and
act by our own strength. I do not want material as material; no one
does--but every life requires a full experience, a various
experience--and I have a profound conviction that where a poet has
been shut from most of the outward aspects of life, he is at a
lamentable disadvantage. Can you, speaking for yourself, separate the
results in you from the external influences at work around you, that
you say so boldly that you get nothing from the world? You do not
_directly_, I know--but you do indirectly and by a rebound. Whatever
acts upon you, becomes _you_--and whatever you love or hate, whatever
charms you or is scorned by you, acts on you and becomes _you_. Have
you read the 'Improvisatore'? or will you? The writer seems to feel,
just as I do, the good of the outward life; and he is a poet in his
soul. It is a book full of beauty and had a great charm to me.

As to the Polkas and Cellariuses I do not covet them of course ... but
what a strange world you seem to have, to me at a distance--what a
strange husk of a world! How it looks to me like mandarin-life or
something as remote; nay, not mandarin-life but mandarin _manners_,
... life, even the outer life, meaning something deeper, in my account
of it. As to dear Mr. Kenyon I do not make the mistake of fancying
that many can look like him or talk like him or _be_ like him. I know
enough to know otherwise. When he spoke of me he should have said that
I was better notwithstanding the east wind. It is really true--I am
getting slowly up from the prostration of the severe cold, and feel
stronger in myself.

But Mrs. Norton discourses excellent music--and for the rest, there
are fruits in the world so over-ripe, that they will fall, ... without
being gathered. Let Maynooth witness to it! _if you think it worth
while_!

Ever yours,

ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

And _is it_ nothing to be 'justified to one's self in one's
resources?' '_That's all_,' indeed! For the 'soul's country' we will
have it also--and I know how well the birds sing in it. How glad I was
by the way to see your letter!

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Wednesday Morning.
[Post-mark, April 30, 1845.]

If you did but know, dear Miss Barrett, how the 'full stop' after
'Morning' just above, has turned out the fullest of stops,--and how
for about a quarter of an hour since the ink dried I have been
reasoning out the why and wherefore of the stopping, the wisdom of it,
and the folly of it....

By this time you see what you have got in me--You ask me questions,
'if I like novels,' 'if the "Improvisatore" is not good,' 'if travel
and sightseeing do not effect this and that for one,' and 'what I am
devising--play or poem,'--and I shall not say I could not answer at
all manner of lengths--but, let me only begin some good piece of
writing of the kind, and ... no, you shall have it, have what I was
going to tell you stops such judicious beginnings,--in a parallel
case, out of which your ingenuity shall, please, pick the
meaning--There is a story of D'Israeli's, an old one, with an episode
of strange interest, or so I found it years ago,--well, you go
breathlessly on with the people of it, page after page, till at last
the end _must_ come, you feel--and the tangled threads draw to one,
and an out-of-door feast in the woods helps you ... that is, helps
them, the people, wonderfully on,--and, lo, dinner is done, and Vivian
Grey is here, and Violet Fane there,--and a detachment of the party is
drafted off to go catch butterflies, and only two or three stop
behind. At this moment, Mr. Somebody, a good man and rather the lady's
uncle, 'in answer to a question from Violet, drew from his pocket a
small neatly written manuscript, and, seating himself on an inverted
wine-cooler, proceeded to read the following brief remarks upon the
characteristics of the Moeso-gothic literature'--this ends the
page,--which you don't turn at once! But when you _do_, in bitterness
of soul, turn it, you read--'On consideration, I' (Ben, himself)
'shall keep them for Mr. Colburn's _New Magazine_'--and deeply you
draw thankful breath! (Note this 'parallel case' of mine is pretty
sure to meet the usual fortune of my writings--you will ask what it
means--and this it means, or should mean, all of it, instance and
reasoning and all,--that I am naturally earnest, in earnest about
whatever thing I do, and little able to write about one thing while I
think of another)--

I think I will really write verse to you some day--_this_ day, it is
quite clear I had better give up trying.

No, spite of all the lines in the world, I will make an end of it, as
Ophelia with her swan's-song,--for it grows too absurd. But remember
that I write letters to nobody but you, and that I want method and
much more. That book you like so, the Danish novel, must be full of
truth and beauty, to judge from the few extracts I have seen in
Reviews. That a Dane should write so, confirms me in an old
belief--that Italy is stuff for the use of the North, and no
more--pure Poetry there is none, nearly as possible none, in Dante
even--material for Poetry in the pitifullest romancist of their
thousands, on the contrary--strange that those great wide black eyes
should stare nothing out of the earth that lies before them! Alfieri,
with even grey eyes, and a life of travel, writes you some fifteen
tragedies as colourless as salad grown under a garden glass with
matting over it--as free, that is, from local colouring, touches of
the soil they are said to spring from,--think of 'Saulle,' and his
Greek attempts!

I expected to see Mr. Kenyon, at a place where I was last week, but he
kept away. Here is the bad wind back again, and the black sky. I am
sure I never knew till now whether the East or West or South were the
quarter to pray for--But surely the weather was a little better last
week, and you, were you not better? And do you know--but it's all
self-flattery I believe,--still I cannot help fancying the East wind
does my head harm too!

Ever yours faithfully,

R. BROWNING.

_E.B.B. to R.B._

Thursday.
[Post-mark, May 2, 1845.]

People say of you and of me, dear Mr. Browning, that we love the
darkness and use a sphinxine idiom in our talk; and really you do talk
a little like a sphinx in your argument drawn from 'Vivian Grey.' Once
I sate up all night to read 'Vivian Grey'; but I never drew such an
argument from him. Not that I give it up (nor _you_ up) for a mere
mystery. Nor that I can '_see what you have got in you_,' from a mere
guess. But just observe! If I ask questions about novels, is it not
because I want to know how much elbow-room there may be for our
sympathies ... and whether there is room for my loose sleeves, and the
lace lappets, as well as for my elbows; and because I want to see
_you_ by the refracted lights as well as by the direct ones; and
because I am willing for you to know _me_ from the beginning, with all
my weaknesses and foolishnesses, ... as they are accounted by people
who say to me 'no one would ever think, without knowing you, that you
were so and so.' Now if I send all my idle questions to _Colburn's
Magazine_, with other Gothic literature, and take to standing up in a
perpendicular personality like the angel on the schoolman's needle, in
my letters to come, without further leaning to the left or the
right--why the end would be that _you_ would take to 'running after
the butterflies,' for change of air and exercise. And then ... oh ...
then, my 'small neatly written manuscripts' might fall back into my
desk...! (_Not_ a 'full stop'!.)

Indeed ... I do assure you ... I never for a moment thought of 'making
conversation' about the 'Improvisatore' or novels in general, when I
wrote what I did to you. I might, to other persons ... perhaps.
Certainly not to _you_. I was not dealing round from one pack of cards
to you and to others. That's what you meant to reproach me for you
know,--and of that, I am not guilty at all. I never could think of
'making conversation' in a letter to _you_--never. Women are said to
partake of the nature of children--and my brothers call me 'absurdly
childish' sometimes: and I am capable of being childishly 'in earnest'
about novels, and straws, and such 'puppydogs' tails' as my Flush's!
Also I write more letters than you do, ... I write in fact almost as
you pay visits, ... and one has to 'make conversation' in turn, of
course. _But_--give me something to vow by--whatever you meant in the
'Vivian Grey' argument, you were wrong in it! and you never can be
much more wrong--which is a comfortable reflection.

Yet you leap very high at Dante's crown--or you do not leap, ... you
simply extend your hand to it, and make a rustling among the laurel
leaves, which is somewhat prophane. Dante's poetry only materials for
the northern rhymers! I must think of that ... if you please ...
before I agree with you. Dante's poetry seems to come down in hail,
rather than in rain--but count me the drops congealed in one
hailstone! Oh! the 'Flight of the Duchess'--do let us hear more of
her! Are you (I wonder) ... not a 'self-flatterer,' ... but ... a
flatterer.

Ever yours,

E.B.B.

_R.B. to E.B.B._

Saturday Morning.
[Post-mark, May 3, 1845.]

Now shall you see what you shall see--here shall be 'sound speech not
to be reproved,'--for this morning you are to know that the soul of me
has it all her own way, dear Miss Barrett, this green cool
nine-in-the-morning time for my chestnut tree over there, and for me
who only coaxed my good-natured--(really)--body up, after its
three-hours' night-rest on condition it should lounge, or creep about,
incognito and without consequences--and so it shall, all but my
right-hand which is half-spirit and 'cuts' its poor relation, and
passes itself off for somebody (that is, some soul) and is doubly
active and ready on such occasions--Now I shall tell you all about it,
first what last letter meant, and then more. You are to know, then
that for some reason, that looked like an instinct, I thought I ought
not to send shaft on shaft, letter-plague on letter, with such an
uninterrupted clanging ... that I ought to wait, say a week at least
having killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your
dogs--but not being exactly Phoibos Apollon, you are to know further
that when I _did_ think I might go modestly on, ... [Greek: �moi], let
me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what
dislocation of ancles! Plainly, from waiting and turning my eyes away
(not from _you_, but from you in your special capacity of being
_written_-to, not spoken-to) when I turned again you had grown
formidable somehow--though that's not the word,--nor are you the
person, either,--it was my fortune, my privilege of being your friend
this one way, that it seemed a shame for me to make no better use of
than taking it up with talk about books and I don't know what. Write
what I will, you would read for once, I think--well, then,--what I
shall write shall be--something on this book, and the other book, and
my own books, and Mary Hewitt's books, and at the end of it--good bye,
and I hope here is a quarter of an hour rationally spent. So the
thought of what I should find in my heart to say, and the contrast
with what I suppose I ought to say ... all these things are against
me. But this is very foolish, all the same, I need not be told--and is
part and parcel of an older--indeed primitive body of mine, which I
shall never wholly get rid of, of desiring to do nothing when I cannot
do all; seeing nothing, getting, enjoying nothing, where there is no
seeing and getting and enjoying _wholly_--and in this case, moreover,
you are _you_, and know something about me, if not much, and have read
Bos on the art of supplying Ellipses, and (after, particularly, I have
confessed all this, why and how it has been) you will _subaudire_ when
I pull out my Medi�val-Gothic-Architectural-Manuscript (so it was, I
remember now,) and instruct you about corbeils and ogives ... though,
after all, it was none of Vivian's doing, that,--all the uncle kind or
man's, which I never professed to be. Now you see how I came to say
some nonsense (I very vaguely think _what_) about Dante--some
desperate splash I know I made for the beginning of my picture, as
when a painter at his wits' end and hunger's beginning says 'Here
shall the figure's hand be'--and spots _that_ down, meaning to reach
it naturally from the other end of his canvas,--and leaving off tired,
there you see the spectral disjoined thing, and nothing between it and
rationality. I intended to shade down and soften off and put in and
leave out, and, before I had done, bring Italian Poets round to their
old place again in my heart, giving new praise if I took old,--anyhow
Dante is out of it all, as who knows but I, with all of him in my head
and heart? But they do fret one, those tantalizing creatures, of fine
passionate class, with such capabilities, and such a facility of being
made pure mind of. And the special instance that vexed me, was that a
man of sands and dog-roses and white rock and green sea-water just
under, should come to Italy where my heart lives, and discover the
sights and sounds ... certainly discover them. And so do all Northern
writers; for take up handfuls of sonetti, rime, poemetti, doings of
those who never did anything else,--and try and make out, for
yourself, what ... say, what flowers they tread on, or trees they walk
under,--as you might bid _them_, those tree and flower loving
creatures, pick out of _our_ North poetry a notion of what _our_
daisies and harebells and furze bushes and brambles are--'Odorosi
fioretti, rose porporine, bianchissimi gigli.' And which of you
eternal triflers was it called yourself 'Shelley' and so told me years
ago that in the mountains it was a feast

When one should find those globes of deep red gold--
Which in the woods the strawberry-tree doth bear,
Suspended in their emerald atmosphere.

so that when my Uncle walked into a sorb-tree, not to tumble sheer
over Monte Calvano, and I felt the fruit against my face, the little
ragged bare-legged guide fairly laughed at my knowing them so
well--'Niursi--sorbi!' No, no,--does not all Naples-bay and half
Sicily, shore and inland, come flocking once a year to the Piedigrotta
f�te only to see the blessed King's Volanti, or livery servants all in
their best; as though heaven opened; and would not I engage to bring
the whole of the Piano (of Sorrento) in likeness to a red velvet
dressing gown properly spangled over, before the priest that held it
out on a pole had even begun his story of how Noah's son Shem, the
founder of Sorrento, threw it off to swim thither, as the world knows
he did? Oh, it makes one's soul angry, so enough of it. But never
enough of telling you--bring all your sympathies, come with loosest
sleeves and longest lace-lappets, and you and yours shall find 'elbow
room,' oh, shall you not! For never did man, woman or child, Greek,
Hebrew, or as Danish as our friend, like a thing, not to say love it,
but I liked and loved it, one liking neutralizing the rebellious stir
of its fellow, so that I don't go about now wanting the fixed stars
before my time; this world has not escaped me, thank God; and--what
other people say is the best of it, may not escape me after all,
though until so very lately I made up my mind to do without
it;--perhaps, on that account, and to make fair amends to other
people, who, I have no right to say, complain without cause. I have
been surprised, rather, with something not unlike illness of late--I
have had a constant pain in the head for these two months, which only
very rough exercise gets rid of, and which stops my 'Luria' and much
besides. I thought I never could be unwell. Just now all of it is
gone, thanks to polking all night and walking home by broad daylight
to the surprise of the thrushes in the bush here. And do you know I
said 'this must _go_, cannot mean to stay, so I will not tell Miss
Barrett why this and this is not done,'--but I mean to tell you all,
or more of the truth, because you call me 'flatterer,' so that my eyes
widened again! I, and in what? And of whom, pray? not of _you_, at all
events,--of whom then? _Do_ tell me, because I want to stand with
you--and am quite in earnest there. And 'The Flight of the Duchess,'
to leave nothing out, is only the beginning of a story written some
time ago, and given to poor Hood in his emergency at a day's
notice,--the true stuff and story is all to come, the 'Flight,' and
what you allude to is the mere introduction--but the Magazine has
passed into other hands and