The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett Part 36

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

Tuesday.

[Post-mark, December 2, 1845.]

I was happy, so happy before! But I am happier and richer now. My love--no words could serve here, but there is life before us, and to the end of it the vibration now struck will extend--I will live and die with your beautiful ring, your beloved hair--comforting me, blessing me.

Let me write to-morrow--when I think on all you have been and are to me, on the wonder of it and the deliciousness, it makes the paper words that come seem vainer than ever--To-morrow I will write.

May G.o.d bless you, my own, my precious--

I am all your own

R.B.

I have thought again, and believe it will be best to select the finger _you_ intended ... as the alteration will be simpler, I find; and one is less liable to observation and comment.

Was not that Mr. Kenyon last evening? And did he ask, or hear, or say anything?

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

[Post-mark, December 3, 1845.]

See, dearest, what the post brings me this minute! Now, is it not a good omen, a pleasant inconscious prophecy of what is to be? Be it well done, or badly--there are you, leading me up and onward, in his review as everywhere, at every future time! And our names will go together--be read together. In itself this is nothing to _you_, dear poet--but the unexpectedness, unintended significance of it has pleased me very much--_does_ it not please you?--I thought I was to figure in that cold _Quarterly_ all by myself, (for he writes for it)--but here you are close by me; it cannot but be for good. He has no knowledge whatever that I am even a friend of yours. Say you are pleased!

There was no writing yesterday for me--nor will there be much to-day.

In some moods, you know, I turn and take a thousand new views of what you say ... and find fault with you to your surprise--at others, I rest on you, and feel _all_ well, all _best_ ... now, for one instance, even that phrase of the _possibility_ 'and what is to follow,'--even _that_ I cannot except against--I am happy, contented; too well, too prodigally blessed to be even able to murmur just sufficiently loud to get, in addition to it all, a sweetest stopping of the mouth! I will say quietly and becomingly 'Yes--I do promise you'--yet it is some solace to--No--I will _not_ even couple the promise with an adjuration that you, at the same time, see that they care for me properly at Hanwell Asylum ... the best by all accounts: yet I feel so sure of _you_, so safe and confident in you! If any of it had been _my_ work, my own ... distrust and foreboding had pursued me from the beginning; but all is _yours_--you crust me round with gold and jewelry like the wood of a sceptre; and why should you transfer your own work? Wood enough to choose from in the first instance, but the choice once made!... So I rest on you, for life, for death, beloved--beside you do stand, in my solemn belief, the direct miraculous gift of G.o.d to me--that is my solemn belief; may I be thankful!

I am anxious to hear from you ... when am I not?--but _not_ before the American letter is written and sent. Is that done? And who was the visitor on Monday--and if &c. _what_ did he remark?--And what is right or wrong with Sat.u.r.day--is it to be mine?

Bless you, dearest--now and for ever--words cannot say how much I am your own.

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

Tuesday Evening.

[Post-mark, December 4, 1845.]

No Mr. Kenyon after all--not yesterday, not to-day; and the knock at the door belonged perhaps to the post, which brought me a kind letter from Mrs. Jameson to ask how I was, and if she might come--but she won't come on Sat.u.r.day.... I shall 'provide'--she may as well (and better) come on a free day. On the other side, are you sure that Mr.

Procter may not stretch out his hand and seize on Sat.u.r.day (he was to dine with you, you said), or that some new engagement may not start up suddenly in the midst of it? I trust to you, in such a case, to alter _our_ arrangement, without a second thought. Monday stands close by, remember, and there's a Sat.u.r.day to follow Monday ... and I should understand at a word, or apart from a word.

Just as _you_ understand how to 'take me with guile,' when you tell me that anything in me can have any part in making you happy ... you, who can say such words and call them 'vain words.' Ah, well! If I only knew certainly, ... more certainly than the thing may be known by either me or you, ... that nothing in me could have any part in making you _un_happy, ... ah, would it not be enough ... _that_ knowledge ...

to content me, to overjoy me? but _that_ lies too high and out of reach, you see, and one can't hope to get at it except by the ladder Jacob saw, and which an archangel helped to hide away behind the gate of Heaven afterwards.

_Wednesday._--In the meantime I had a letter from you yesterday, and am promised another to-day. How ... I was going to say 'kind' and pull down the thunders ... how _un_kind ... will _that_ do? ... how good you are to me--how dear you must be! Dear--dearest--if I feel that you love me, can I help it if, without any other sort of certain knowledge, the world grows lighter round me? being but a mortal woman, can I help it? no--certainly.

I comfort myself by thinking sometimes that I can at least understand you, ... comprehend you in what you are and in what you possess and combine; and that, if doing this better than others who are better otherwise than I, I am, so far, worthier of the ... I mean that to understand you is something, and that I account it something in my own favour ... mine.

Yet when you tell me that I ought to know some things, though untold, you are wrong, and speak what is impossible. My imagination sits by the roadside [Greek: apedilos] like the startled sea nymph in aeschylus, but never dares to put one unsandalled foot, unbidden, on a certain tract of ground--never takes a step there unled! and never (I write the simple truth) even as the alternative of the probability of your ceasing to care for me, have I touched (untold) on the possibility of your caring _more_ for me ... never! That you should _continue_ to care, was the utmost of what I saw in that direction.

So, when you spoke of a 'strengthened feeling,' judge how I listened with my heart--judge!

'Luria' is very great. You will avenge him with the sympathies of the world; that, I foresee.... And for the rest, it is a magnanimity which grows and grows, and which will, of a worldly necessity, fall by its own weight at last; nothing less being possible. The scene with Tiburzio and the end of the act with its great effects, are more pathetic than professed pathos. When I come to criticise, it will be chiefly on what I take to be a little occasional flatness in the versification, which you may remove if you please, by knotting up a few lines here and there. But I shall write more of 'Luria,'--and well remember in the meanwhile, that you wanted smoothness, you said.

May G.o.d bless you. I shall have the letter to-night, I think gladly.

Yes,--I thought of the greater safety from 'comment'--it is best in every way.

I lean on you and trust to you, and am always, as to one who is all to me,

Your own--

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

[Post-mark, December 4, 1845.]

Why of course I am pleased--I should have been pleased last year, for the vanity's sake of being reviewed in your company. Now, as far as that vice of vanity goes ... shall I tell you?... I would infinitely prefer to see you set before the public in your own right solitude, and supremacy, apart from me or any one else, ... this, as far as my vice of vanity goes, ... and because, vainer I am of my poet than of my poems ... _pour cause_. But since, according to the _Quarterly_ regime, you were to be not apart but with somebody of my degree, I am glad, pleased, that it should be with myself:--and since I was to be there at all, I am pleased, very much pleased that it should be with _you_,--oh, of course I am pleased!--I am pleased that the 'names should be read together' as you say, ... and am happily safe from the apprehension of that ingenious idea of yours about 'my leading _you_'

&c. ... quite happily safe from the apprehension of that idea's occurring to any mind in the world, except just your own. Now if I 'find fault' with you for writing down such an extravagance, such an ungainly absurdity, (oh, I shall abuse it just as I shall choose!) _can_ it be 'to your surprise?' _can_ it? Ought you to say such things, when in the first place they are unfit in themselves and inapplicable, and in the second place, abominable in my eyes? The qualification for Hanwell Asylum is different peradventure from what you take it to be--we had better not examine it too nearly. You never will say such words again? It is your promise to me? Not those words--and not any in their likeness.

Also ... nothing is _my_ work ... if you please! What an omen you take in calling anything my work! If it is my work, woe on it--for everything turns to evil which I touch. Let it be G.o.d's work and yours, and I may take breath and wait in hope--and indeed I exclaim to myself about the miracle of it far more even than you can do. It seems to me (as I say over and over ... I say it to my own thoughts oftenest) it seems to me still a dream how you came here at all, ...

the very machinery of it seems miraculous. Why did I receive you and only you? Can I tell? no, not a word.

Last year I had such an escape of seeing Mr. Horne; and in this way it was. He was going to Germany, he said, for an indefinite time, and took the trouble of begging me to receive him for ten minutes before he went. I answered with my usual 'no,' like a wild Indian--whereupon he wrote me a letter so expressive of mortification and vexation ...

'mortification' was one of the words used, I remember, ... that I grew ashamed of myself and told him to come any day (of the last five or six days he had to spare) between two and five. Well!--he never came.

Either he was overcome with work and engagements of various sorts and had not a moment, (which was his way of explaining the matter and quite true I dare say) or he was vexed and resolved on punis.h.i.+ng me for my caprices. If the latter was the motive, I cannot call the punishment effective, ... for I clapped my hands for joy when I felt my danger to be pa.s.sed--and now of course, I have no scruples.... I may be as capricious as I please, ... may I not? Not that I ask you.

It is a settled matter. And it is useful to keep out Mr. Chorley with Mr. Horne, and Mr. Horne with Mr. Chorley, and the rest of the world with those two. Only the miracle is that _you_ should be behind the enclosure--within it ... and so!--

_That_ is _my_ side of the wonder! of the machinery of the wonder, ...

as _I_ see it!--But there are greater things than these.

Speaking of the portrait of you in the 'Spirit of the Age' ... which is not like ... no!--which has not your character, in a line of it ...

something in just the forehead and eyes and hair, ... but even _that_, thrown utterly out of your order, by another bearing so unlike you...!

speaking of that portrait ... shall I tell you?--Mr. Horne had the goodness to send me all those portraits, and I selected the heads which, in right hero-wors.h.i.+p, were anything to me, and had them framed after a rough fas.h.i.+on and hung up before my eyes; Harriet Martineau's ... because she was a woman and admirable, and had written me some kind letters--and for the rest, Wordsworth's, Carlyle's, Tennyson's and yours. The day you paid your first visit here, I, in a fit of shyness not quite unnatural, ... though I have been cordially laughed at for it by everybody in the house ... pulled down your portrait, ...

(there is the nail, under Wordsworth--) and then pulled down Tennyson's in a fit of justice,--because I would not have his hung up and yours away. It was the delight of my brothers to open all the drawers and the boxes, and whatever they could get access to, and find and take those two heads and hang them on the old nails and a.n.a.lyse my 'absurdity' to me, day after day; but at last I tired them out, being obstinate; and finally settled the question one morning by fastening the print of you inside your Paracelsus. Oh no, it is not like--and I knew it was not, before I saw you, though Mr. Kenyon said, 'Rather like!'

By the way Mr. Kenyon does not come. It is strange that he should not come: when he told me that he could not see me 'for a week or a fortnight,' he meant it, I suppose.

So it is to be on Sat.u.r.day? And I will write directly to America--the letter will be sent by the time you get this. May G.o.d bless you ever.

It is not so much a look of 'ferocity,' ... as you say, ... in that head, as of _expression by intention_. Several people have said of it what n.o.body would say of you ... 'How affected-looking.' Which is too strong--but it is not like you, in any way, and there's the truth.

So until Sat.u.r.day. I read 'Luria' and feel the life in him. But _walk_ and do not _work_! do you?

Wholly your

E.B.B.