Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“ I am a little in fear that your generosity and excess of kindness may run the risk of lowering the ideal of poetry in England by lifting above the mark the names of some poetasters. Do you know, you take up your heart sometimes by mistake, to admire with, when you ought to use it only to love with? and this is apt to be dangerous, with your reputation and authority in matters of literature. See how impertinent I am! But we should all take care to teach the world that poetry is a divine thing, should we not? that is, not mere verse-making, though the verses be pretty in their way. ”

“ Now tell me, what right has England to be the dearest country in the world? But I love dearly dear England, and we hope to spend many a green summer in her yet. The winters you will excuse us, will you not? People who are, like us, neither rich nor strong, claim such excuses. I am wonderfully well, and far better and stronger than before what you call the Pisan 'crisis.' Robert declares that nobody would know me, I look so much better. And you heard from dearest Henrietta. Ah, both of my dearest sisters have been perfect to me. No words can express my feelings towards their goodness. ”

“ Robert exceedingly admires her. As to Italian society, one may as well take to longing for the evening star, for it seems quite as inaccessible; and indeed, of society of any sort, we have not much, nor wish for it, nor miss it. Dearest friend, if I could open my heart to you in all seriousness, you would see nothing there but a sort of enduring wonder of happiness—yes, and some gratitude, I do hope, besides. Could everything be well in England, I should only have to melt out of the body at once in the joy and the glow of it. ”

“ I write on my own doubts, you see, and you will smile at them, or understand all through them that if the book had not interested me like a piece of real life, I should not find myself backbiting as if all these were 'my neighbours.' The pure tender feeling of the closing scenes touched me to better purpose, believe me, and I applaud from my heart and conscience your rejection of that low creed of 'poetical justice' which is neither justice nor poetry which is as degrading to virtue as false to experience, and which, thrown from your book, raises it into a pure atmosphere at once. ”

“ Their faith in me, and undeviating affection for me, I shall be grateful for to the end of my existence, and to the extent of my power of feeling gratitude. My dearest sisters!—especially, let me say, my own beloved Arabel, who, with no consolation except the exercise of a most generous tenderness, has looked only to what she considered my good—never doubting me, never swerving for one instant in her love for me. May God reward her as I cannot. Dearest Henrietta loves me too, but loses less in me, and has reasons for not misjudging me. ”

“ Never was a more beautiful, serene, assuring death than this we are all in tears for—for, believe me, my very dear sister, I have mourned with you, knowing what we all have lost, I who never saw her nor shall see her until a few years shall bring us all together to the place where none mourn nor are parted. Sarianna, will it not be possible, do you think, for you and your father to come here, if only for a few months? Then you might decide on the future upon more knowledge than you have now. It would be comfort and joy to Robert and me if we could all of us live together henceforward. ”

“ The best of all was the prospect you hold out to us of coming to Italy this year. Do, do come. Delighted we shall be to see you in Florence, and wise it will be in you to cast behind your back both the fear of Radetsky and as much English care as may be. Now, would it not do infinite good to Lady Byron if you could carry her with you into the sun? Surely it would do her great good; the change, the calm, the atmosphere of beauty and brightness, which harmonises so wonderfully with every shade of human feeling. ”

“ And he, as you say, had done everything for me, had loved me for reasons which had helped to weary me of myself, loved me heart to heart persistently—in spite of my own will—drawn me back to life and hope again when I had done with both. My life seemed to belong to him and to none other at last, and I had no power to speak a word. Have faith in me, my dearest friend, till you can know him. The intellect is so little in comparison to all the rest, to the womanly tenderness, the inexhaustible goodness, the high and noble aspiration of every hour. ”

“ Dearest friend, do believe that we felt your goodness in Coming to us—in making us an object—before you left Italy; it fills up the measure of goodness and kindness for which we shall thank and love you all our lives. Never fancy that we can forget you or be less touched by the memory of what you have been to us in affection and sympathy—never. And don't you lose sight of us; do write often, and do, do make haste and come back to Italy, and then make use of us in any and every possible way as house-takers or house-mates, for we are ready to accept the lowest place or the highest. ”

“ ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.
To Mr. Chorley
50 Wimpole Street: January 7, 1845.
Dear Mr. Chorley,—You are very good to deign to answer my impertinences, and not to be disgusted by my defamations of 'the grandmothers,' and (to diminish my perversity in your eyes) I am ready to admit at once that we are generally too apt to run into premature classification—the error of all imperfect knowledge; and into unreasonable exclusiveness—the vice of it. We spoil the shining surface of life by our black lines drawn through and through, as if ominously for a game of the fox and goose. ”

“ Then my own strength has wonderfully improved, just as my medical friends prophesied; and it seems like a dream when I find myself able to climb the hills with Robert and help him to lose himself in the forests. I have been growing stronger and stronger, and where it is to stop I can't tell, really; I can do as much, or more, now than at any point of my life since I arrived at woman's estate. The air of this place seems to penetrate the heart and not the lungs only; it draws you, raises you, excites you. Mountain air without its keenness, sheathed in Italian sunshine, think what that must be! ”

“ If your health should suffer, what grief upon grief to those who grieve already! And besides, we who have to live are not to lie down under the burden. There will be time enough for lying down presently, very soon; and in the meanwhile there is plenty of God's work to do with the body and with the soul, and we have to do it as cheerfully as we can. Dearest Sarianna, you can look behind and before, on blessed memories and holy hopes—love is as full for you as ever in the old relation, even though her life in the world is cut off. There is no drop of bitterness in all this flood of sorrow. ”

“ Thank you, dearest Mr. Kenyon; and I should (and shall) thank Miss Thomson too for caring to spend a thought on me after all the Parisian glories and rationalities which I sympathise with by many degrees nearer than you seem to do. We, in this England here, are just social barbarians, to my mind—that is, we know how to read and write and think, and even talk on occasion; but we carry the old rings in our noses, and are proud of the flowers pricked into our cuticles. By so much are they better than we on the Continent, I always think. Life has a thinner rind, and so a livelier sap. ”

“ Robert's nursing does not mend his spirits much. I shall be very glad to get him away from Florence; he has suffered too much here to rally as I long to see him do, because, dearest Sarianna, we have to live after all; and to live rightly we must turn our faces forward and press forward and not look backward morbidly for the footsteps in the dust of those beloved ones who travelled with us but yesterday. They themselves are not behind but before, and we carry with us our tenderness living and undiminished towards them, to be completed when the round of this life is complete for us also. ”

“ I have not made a demi-god of Louis Napoleon, by the way—no, and I don't mean it. I expect some better final result than he has just proved himself to be of the French Revolution, with all its bitter and cruel consequences hitherto, so I can't quite agree with you. Only so far, that he has shown himself up to this point to be an upright man with noble impulses, and that I give him much of my sympathy and respect in the difficult position held by him. A man of genius he does not seem to be—and what, after all, will he manage to do at Rome? I don't take up the frantic Republican cry in Italy. ”

“ Martin, most truly yours,
E.B. BARRETT.
To Miss Commeline
Hope End: Monday, [October 1828] .
My dear Miss Commeline,—Thank you for the sympathy and interest which you have extended towards us in our heavy affliction. Even you cannot know all that we have lost; but God knows, and it has pleased Him to take away the blessing that He gave. And all must be right since He doeth all! Indeed we did not foresee this great grief! If we had we could not have felt it less; but I should not then have been denied the consolation of being with her at the last. ”

“ If ever Grand Duke deserved benediction this Duke does. We hear that he was quite moved, overpowered, and wept like a child. Nevertheless the most of Italy is under the cloud, and God knows how all may end as the thunder ripens. Now I mustn't, I suppose, write politics. Our plans about England are afloat. Impossible to know what we shall do, but if not this summer, the summer after must help us to the sight of some beloved faces. It will be a midsummer dream, and we shall return to winter in Italy. My Flush is as well as ever, and perhaps gayer than ever I knew him. ”

“ The drawback of Italy is the distance from England. If it were but as near as Paris, for instance, why in that case we should settle here at once, I do think, the conveniences and luxuries of life are of such incredible cheapness, the climate so divine, and the way of things altogether so serene and suited to our tastes and instincts. But to give up England and the English, the dear, dearest treasure of English love, is impossible, so we just linger and linger. The Boyles go to England from the press of panic, Lady Boyle being old and infirm. ”

“ If the hand had always obeyed the soul, he would have been a genius of the first order. As it is, he lived on the slope of greatness and could not be steadfast and calm. His life was one long agony of self-assertion. Poor, poor Haydon! See how the world treats those who try too openly for its gratitude! 'Tom Thumb for ever' over the heads of the giants.
So you heard that I was quite well? Don't believe everything you hear. But I am really in a way to be well, if I could have such sunshine as we have been burning in lately, and a fair field of peace besides. ”

“ My dearest Mr. Boyd,—I thank you for the Cyprus, and also for a still sweeter amreeta—your praise. Certainly to be praised as you praise me might well be supposed likely to turn a sager head than mine, but I feel that (with all my sensitive and grateful appreciation of such words) I am removed rather below than above the ordinary temptations of vanity. Poetry is to me rather a passion than an ambition, and the gadfly which drives me along that road pricks deeper than an expectation of fame could do. ”

“ The hour is sufficiently conclusive against dangerous enthusiasm. Poor France, poor France! News of the dreadful massacre at Paris just reaches us, and the letters and newspapers not arriving to-day, everybody fears a continuation of the crisis. How is it to end? Who 'despairs of the republic?' Why, I do! I fear, I fear, that it cannot stand in France, and you seem to have not much more hope. My husband has a little, with melancholy intermediate prospects; but my own belief that the people have had enough of democratic institutions and will be impatient for a kingship anew. ”

“ The people are gentle, courteous, refined, and tenderhearted. What Balzac would call 'femmelette.' All Tuscany is 'Lucien' himself. The leaning to the artistic nature without the strength of genius implies demoralisation in most cases, and it is this which makes your 'good for nothing poets and poetesses,' about which I love so to battle with you. Genius, I maintain always, you know, is a purifying power and goes with high moral capacities. ”

“ The divineness of poetry is far more to me than either pride of sex or personal pride, and, though willing to acknowledge the lowest breath of the inspiration, I cannot the 'powder and patch.' As powder and patch I may, but not as poetry. And though I in turn may suffer for this myself—though I too (anch' io) may be turned out of 'Arcadia,' and told that I am not a poet, still, I should be content, I hope, that the divineness of poetry be proved in my humanness, rather than lowered to my uses. ”

“ Indeed, dearest Mrs. Martin, it is almost surprising how we contrive to be as dull in London as in Devonshire—perhaps more so, for the sight of a multitude induces a sense of seclusion which one has not without it; and, besides, there were at Sidmouth many more known faces and listened-to voices than we see and hear in this place. No house yet! And you will scarcely have patience to read that papa has seen and likes another house in Devonshire Place, and that he may take it, and we may be settled in it, before the year closes. I myself think of the whole business indifferently. ”

“ The salt has lost its savour, the meaning has escaped from the term; we know nothing of what people will do when they aspire to Liberty. The holiness of liberty is desecrated by the sign of the ass's hoof. Fixed principles, either of opinion or action, seem clearly gone out of the world. The principle of Destruction is in the place of the principle of Re-integration, or of Radical Reform, as we called it in England. I look all round and can sympathise nowhere. The rulers hold by rottenness, and the people leap into the abyss, and nobody knows why this is, or why that is. ”

“ Dearest friend, are you well and in good spirits? Think of me over the Cyprus, between the cup and the lip, though bad things are said to fall out so. We have, instead of Cyprus, Montepulciano, the famous 'King of Wine,' crowned king, you remember, by the grace of a poet! Your Cyprus, however, keeps supremacy over me, and will not abdicate the divine right of being associated with you. I speak of wine, but we live here the most secluded, quiet life possible—reading and writing, and talking of all things in heaven and earth, and a little besides ”

“ I have looked at the wonderful Duomo. This cathedral! After all, the elaborate grace of the Pisan cathedral is one thing, and the massive grandeur of this of Florence is another and better thing; it struck me with a sense of the sublime in architecture. At Pisa we say, 'How beautiful!' here we say nothing; it is enough if we can breathe. The mountainous marble masses overcome as we look up—we feel the weight of them on the soul. ”

“ The sound of the river and of the cicala is all the noise we hear. Austrian drums and carriage wheels cannot vex us; God be thanked for it; the silence is full of joy and consolation. I think my husband's spirits are better already and his appetite improved. Certainly little babe's great cheeks are growing rosier and rosier. He is out all day when the sun is not too strong, and Wilson will have it that he is prettier than the whole population of babies here. He fixes his blue eyes on everybody and smiles universal benevolence, rather too indiscriminately it might be if it were not for Flush. ”

“ Robert naturally shrinks from the idea of going to New Cross under the circumstances of dreary change, and for his sake England has grown suddenly to me a land of clouds. Still, to see you and his father, and to be some little comfort to you both, would be the best consolation to him, I am very sure; and so, dearest Sarianna, think of us and speak to us. Could not your father get a long vacation? Could we not meet somewhere? Think how we best may comfort ourselves by comforting you. Never think of us, Sarianna, as apart from you—as if our interest or our pleasure could be apart from yours. ”

“ And lately, Daisy and Sette and Occyta have studied the art of catching shrimps, and soak themselves up to their waists like professors. My love of water concentrates itself in the boat; and this I enjoy very much, when the sea is as blue and calm as the sky, which it has often been lately. Of society we have had little indeed; but Henrietta had more than much of it at Torquay during three months; and as for me, you know I don't want any though I am far from meaning to speak disrespectfully of Mr. Boyds, which has been a pleasure and comfort to me. ”