(It is hard to write, but you bade me do so; yet I had better say
'Master Hunt', as they used to call Webster or Ford.) A nine months'
silence after such a letter as yours seems too strange even to you
perhaps. So understand that you gave us more delight at once than we
could bear, that was the beginning of the waiting to recover spirit
and try and do one's feeling a little less injustice. But soon
followed unexpected sorrows to us and to you, and the expression of
even gratitude grew hard again. Certainly all this while your letter
has been laid before our very eyes, and we have waited for a brighter
day than ever came till we left Florence two months ago and more, then
we brought it to 'answer' among the chestnut trees; but immediately
on our arrival a friend was attacked by fever, and we were kept in
anxiety about him for six weeks. At last he recovered sufficiently to
leave for Florence, and (just think) our little boy became ill,
for the first time in his life, and gave us solicitude enough for a
fortnight: it is nothing now that it is over; he is going about now
almost as well as before, and we go away to-morrow, as I said. But I
will try and get one, at least, of the joys I came to find here, and
really write to you from this place, as I meant to do. '_I_'--you
know it is my wife that I write for, though you entangle and distract
either of us by the reverberations (so to speak) of pleasures over and
above the pleasure you give us. I intend to say, that you praise that
poem, and mix it up with praise of her very self, and then give it to
me directly, and then give it to _her_ with the pride you have just
given me, and then it somehow comes back to me increased so far, till
the effect is just as you probably intended. I wish my wife may know
you more: I wish you may see and know her more, but you cannot live
by her eleven years, as I have done--or yes, what cannot you do, being
the man, the poet you are? This last word, I dare think, I have a
right to say; I _have_ always venerated you as a poet; I believe your
poetry to be sure of its eventual reward; other people, not unlikely,
may feel like me, that there has been no need of getting into feverish
haste to cry out on what is; yet you, who wrote it, can leave it and
look at other poetry, and speak so of it: how well of you!
I am still too near the production of _Aurora Leigh_ to be quite able
to see it all; my wife used to write it, and lay it down to hear our
child spell, or when a visitor came,--it was thrust under the cushion
then. At Paris, a year ago last March, she gave me the first six books
to read, I having never seen a line before. She then wrote the rest,
and transcribed them in London, where I read them also. I wish, in
one sense, that I had written and she had read it.... I shall commend
myself to you by telling you this. Indeed, the proper acknowledgement
of your letter seems to be that one should do something, not say
something. If you were here, I might quite naturally begin repeating
_Giaffar_ or _Solomon_, and the rest. You would see whether I was not
capable of getting all the good out of your praise.
While I write, there is a strange thing that happened last night
impossible to get out of my thoughts. It may give you pain to tell you
of it, yet if with the pain come triumphant memories and hopes, as I
expect there will, you may choose the pain with them. What decides me
to tell it is that I heard you years ago allude to the destruction of
a volume of _Lamia, Isabella, &c., to be restored to you yet_--now you
remember; also, I think, of your putting my name near Shelley's in the
end of your letter, where you say 'since I lost Shelley'. Is it not
strange that I should have transcribed for the first time, last night,
the _Indian Serenade_ that, together with some verses of Metastasio,
accompanied that book? That I should have been reserved to tell
the present possessor of them--to whom they were given by Captain
Roberts--_what_ the poem _was, and that it had been published_! It is
preserved religiously; but the characters are all but illegible, and
I needed a good magnifying-glass to be quite sure of such of them as
remain. The end is that I have rescued three or four variations in the
reading of that divine little poem, as one reads it, at least, in the
_Posthumous Poems_. It is headed the _Indian_ _Serenade_ (not _Lines
to an Indian Air_). In the first stanza the seventh line is 'Hath led
me'; in the second, the third line is 'And the champak's odours fail';
and the eighth, 'O! Beloved as thou art!' In the last stanza, the
seventh line was, 'Oh, press it to thine own again.' Are not all these
better readings? (even to the 'Hath' for 'Has'.) There, I give them
you as you gave us Milton's hair. If I have mistaken in telling you,
you will understand and forgive.
I think I will ask my wife to say a word or two so I shall be sure
that you forgive. Now let my wife say the remainder. All I have
wished to do--know how little likely it was that I should succeed in
that--was to assure you of my pride and affectionate gratitude.--God
bless you ever,