The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Volume I Part 13

And now you will kindly like to have a word said about myself, and it need not be otherwise than a word to give your kindness pleasure. The long splendid summer, exhausting as the heat was to me sometimes, did me essential good, and left me walking about the room and equal to going downstairs (which I achieved four or five times), and even to going out in the chair, without suffering afterwards. And, best of all, the spitting of blood (I must tell you), which more or less kept by me continually, _stopped quite_ some six weeks ago, and I have thus more reasonable hopes of being really and essentially better than I could have with such a symptom loitering behind accidental improvements. Weak enough, and with a sort of pulse which is not excellent, I certainly remain; but still, if I escape any decided attack this winter--and I am in garrison now--there are expectations of further good for next summer, and I may recover some moderate degree of health and strength again, and be able to _do_ good instead of receiving it only.

I write under the eyes of Wordsworth. Not Wordsworth's living eyes, although the actual living poet had the infinite kindness to ask Mr.

Kenyon twice last summer when he was in London, if he might not come to see me. Mr. Kenyon said 'No'--I couldn't have said 'No' to Wordsworth, though I had never gone to sleep again afterwards. But this Wordsworth who looks on me now is Wordsworth in a picture. Mr.

Haydon the artist, with the utmost kindness, has sent me the portrait he was painting of the great poet--an unfinished portrait--and I am to keep it until he wants to finish it. Such a head! such majesty! and the poet stands musing upon Helvellyn! And all that--poet, Helvellyn, and all--is in my room![69]

Give my kind love to Mr. Martin--_our_ kind love, indeed, to both of you--and believe me, my dearest Mrs. Martin,

Your ever affectionate BA.

Is there any hope for us of you before the winter ends? Do consider.

_To H.S. Boyd_ Monday, October 31, 1842.

My very dear Friend,--I have put off from day to day sending you these volumes, and in the meantime _I have had a letter from the great poet_! Did Arabel tell you that my sonnet on the picture was sent to Mr. Haydon, and that Mr. Haydon sent it to Mr. Wordsworth? The result was that Mr. Wordsworth wrote to me. King John's barons were never better pleased with their Charta than I am with this letter.[70]

But I won't tell you any more about it until you have read the poems which I send you. Read first, to put you into good humour, the sonnet written on Westminster Bridge, vol. iii. page 78. Then take from the sixth volume, page 152, the pa.s.sage beginning 'Within the soul' down to page 153 at 'despair,' and again at page 155 beginning with

I have seen A curious child, &c.

down to page 157 to the end of the paragraph. If you admit these pa.s.sages to be fine poetry, I wish much that you would justify me further by reading, out of the _second_ volume, the two poems called 'Laodamia' and 'Tintern Abbey' at page 172 and page 161. I will not ask you to read any more; but I dare say you will rush on of your own account, in which case there is a fine ode upon the 'Power of Sound'

in the same volume. Wordsworth is a philosophical and Christian poet, with depths in his soul to which poor Byron could never reach. Do be candid. Nay, I need not say so, because you always are, as I am,

Your ever affectionate ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

[Footnote 69: It was this picture that called forth the sonnet, 'On a Portrait of Wordsworth by B.R. Haydon' (_Poetical Works_, iii. 62), alluded to in the next letter.]

[Footnote 70: The following is the letter from Wordsworth which gave such pleasure to Miss Barrett, and which she treasured among her papers for the rest of her life. Two slips of the pen have been corrected between brackets.

'Rydal Mount: Oct. 26, '42.

'Dear Miss Barrett,--Through our common friend Mr. Haydon I have received a sonnet which his portrait of me suggested. I should have thanked you sooner for that effusion of a feeling towards myself, with which I am much gratified, but I have been absent from home and much occupied.

'The conception of your sonnet is in full accordance with the painter's intended work, and the expression vigorous; yet the word "ebb," though I do not myself object to it, nor wish to have it altered, will I fear prove obscure to nine readers out of ten.

"A vision free And n.o.ble, Haydon, hath thine art released."

Owing to the want of inflections in our language the construction here is obscure. Would it not be a little [better] thus? I was going to write a small change in the order of the words, but I find it would not remove the objection. The verse, as I take it, would be somewhat clearer thus, if you would tolerate the redundant syllable:

"By a vision free And n.o.ble, Haydon, is thine art released."

I had the gratification of receiving, a good while ago, two copies of a volume of your writing, which I have read with much pleasure, and beg that the thanks which I charged a friend to offer may be repeated [to] you.

'It grieved me much to hear from Mr. Kenyon that your health is so much deranged. But for that cause I should have presumed to call upon you when I was in London last spring.

'With every good wish, I remain, dear Miss Barrett, your much obliged

'WM. WORDSWORTH.'

[Postmark: Ambleside, Oct. 28, 1842.]

It may be added that although Miss Barrett altered the pa.s.sage criticised by the great poet, she did not accept his amendment. It now runs

'A n.o.ble vision free Our Haydon's hand has flung out from the mist.

_To H.S. Boyd_ December 4, 1842.

My very dear Friend,--You will think me in a discontented state of mind when I knit my brows like a 'sleeve of care' over your kind praises. But the truth is, I _won't_ be praised for being liberal in Calvinism and love of Byron. _I_ liberal in commending Byron! Take out my heart and try it! look at it and compare it with yours; and answer and tell me if I do not love and admire Byron more warmly than you yourself do. I suspect it indeed. Why, I am always reproached for my love to Byron. Why, people say to me, '_You_, who overpraise Byron!'

Why, when I was a little girl (and, whatever you may think, my tendency is not to cast off my old loves!) I used to think seriously of dressing up like a boy and running away to be Lord Byron's page.

And _I_ to be praised now for being 'liberal' in admitting the merit of his poetry! _I_!

As for the Calvinism, I don't choose to be liberal there either.

I don't call myself a Calvinist. I hang suspended between the two doctrines, and hide my eyes in G.o.d's love from the sights which other people _say_ they see. I believe simply that the saved are saved by grace, and that they shall hereafter know it fully; and that the lost are lost by their choice and free will--by choosing to sin and die; and I believe absolutely that the deepest d.a.m.ned of all the lost will not dare to whisper to the nearest devil that reproach of Martha: 'If the Lord had been near me, I had not died.' But of the means of the working of G.o.d's grace, and of the time of the formation of the Divine counsels, I know nothing, guess nothing, and struggle to guess nothing; and my persuasion is that when people talk of what was ordained or approved by G.o.d before the foundations of the world, their tendency is almost always towards a confusion of His eternal nature with the human conditions of ours; and to an oblivion of the fact that with _Him_ there can be no after nor before.

At any rate, I do not find it good for myself to examine any more the brickbats of controversy--there is more than enough to think of in truths clearly revealed; more than enough for the exercise of the intellect and affections and adorations. I would rather not suffer myself to be disturbed, and perhaps irritated, where it is not likely that I should ever be informed. And although you tell me that your system of investigation is different from some others, answer me with your accustomed candour, and admit, my very dear friend, that this argument does not depend upon the construction of a Greek sentence or the meaning of a Greek word. Let a certain word[71] be 'fore-know' or 'publicly _favor_,' room for a stormy controversy yet remains. I went through the Romans with you partially, and wholly by myself, by your desire, and in reference to the controversy, long ago; and I could not then, and cannot now, enter into that view of Taylor and Adam Clarke, and yourself I believe, as to the _Jews and Gentiles_. Neither could I conceive that a particular part of the epistle represents an actual dialogue between a Jew and Gentile, since the form of question and answer appears to me there simply rhetorical. The Apostle Paul was learned in rhetoric; and I think he described so, by a rhetorical and vivacious form, that struggle between the flesh and the spirit common to all Christians; the spirit being triumphant through G.o.d in Christ Jesus. These are my impressions. Yours are different. And since we should not probably persuade each other, and since we are both of us fond of and earnest in what we fancy to be the truth, why should we cast away the thousand sympathies we rejoice in, religious and otherwise, for the sake of a fruitless contention? 'What!' you would say (by the time we had quarrelled half an hour), 'can't you talk without being excited?' Half an hour afterwards: 'Pray _do_ lower your voice--it goes through my head!' In another ten minutes: 'I could scarcely have believed you to be so obstinate.' In another: 'Your prejudices are insurmountable, and your reason most womanly--you are degenerated to the last degree.' In another--why, _then_ you would turn me and Flush out of the room and so finish the controversy victoriously.

Was I wrong too, dearest Mr. Boyd, in sending the poems to the 'Athenaeum'? Well, I meant to be right. I fancied that you would rather they were sent; and as your _name_ was not attached, there could be no harm in leaving them to the editor's disposal. They are not inserted, as I antic.i.p.ated. The religious character was a sufficient objection--their character of _prayer_. Mr. Dilke begged me once, while I was writing for him, to write the name of G.o.d and Jesus Christ as little as I could, because those names did not accord with the secular character of the journal!

Ever your affectionate and grateful ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

Tell me how you like the sonnet; but you won't (I prophesy) like it.

Keep the 'Athenaeum.'

[Footnote 71: The Greek [Greek: progignoskein], used in Romans viii.

29.]

_To H.S. Boyd_ December 24, 1842.

My very dear Friend,--I am afraid that you will infer from my silence that you have affronted me into ill temper by your parody upon my sonnet. Yet 'lucus a non lucendo' were a truer derivation. I laughed and thanked you over the parody, and put off writing to you until I had the headache, which forced me to put it off again....

May G.o.d bless you, my dear Mr. Boyd. Mr. Savage Landor once said that anybody who could write a parody deserved to be shot; but as he has written one himself since saying so, he has probably changed his mind.

Arabel sends her love.

Ever your affectionate and grateful ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

_To H.S. Boyd_ January 5, 1842 [1843].

My very dear Friend,--My surprise was inexpressible at your utterance of the name. What! Ossian superior as a poet to Homer! Mr. Boyd saying so! Mr. Boyd treading down the neck of Aeschylus while he praises Ossian! The fact appears to me that anomalous thing among believers--a miracle without an occasion.

I confess I never, never should have guessed the name; not though I had guessed to Doomsday. In the first place I do not believe in Ossian, and having partially examined the testimony (for I don't pretend to any exact learning about it) I consider him as the poetical _lay figure_ upon which Mr. Macpherson dared to cast his personality.

There is a sort of phraseology, nay, an ident.i.ty of occasional phrases, from the antique--but that these so-called Ossianic poems were ever discovered and translated as they stand in their present form, I believe in no wise. As Dr. Johnson wrote to Macpherson, so I would say, 'Mr. Macpherson, I thought you an impostor, and think so still.'

It is many years ago since I looked at Ossian, and I never did much delight in him, as that fact proves. Since your letter came I have taken him up again, and have just finished 'Carthon.' There are beautiful pa.s.sages in it, the most beautiful beginning, I think, 'Desolate is the dwelling of Moina,' and the next place being filled by that address to the sun you magnify so with praise. But the charm of these things is the _only_ charm of all the poems. There is a sound of wild vague music in a monotone--nothing is articulate, nothing _individual_, nothing various. Take away a few poetical phrases from these poems, and they are colourless and bare. Compare them with the old burning ballads, with a wild heart beating in each. How cold they grow in the comparison! Compare them with Homer's grand breathing personalities, with Aeschylus's--nay, but I cannot bear upon my lips or finger the charge of the blasphemy of such comparing, even for religion's sake....

I had another letter from America a few days since, from an American poet of Boston who is establishing a magazine, and asked for contributions from my pen. The Americans are as good-natured to me as if they took me for the high Radical I am, you know.