_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,