_E.B.B. to R.B._
[Post-mark, July 12, 1845.]
You understand that it was not a resolution passed in favour of
formality, when I said what I did yesterday about not going out at the
time you were coming--surely you do; whatever you might signify to a
different effect. If it were necessary for me to go out every day, or
most days even, it would be otherwise; but as it is, I may certainly
keep the day you come, free from the fear of carriages, let the sun
shine its best or worst, without doing despite to you or injury to
me--and that's all I meant to insist upon indeed and indeed. You see,
Jupiter Tonans was good enough to come to-day on purpose to deliver
me--one evil for another! for I confess with shame and contrition,
that I never wait to enquire whether it thunders to the left or the
right, to be frightened most ingloriously. Isn't it a disgrace to
anyone with a pretension to poetry? Dr. Chambers, a part of whose
office it is, Papa says, 'to reconcile foolish women to their
follies,' used to take the side of my vanity, and discourse at length
on the passive obedience of some nervous systems to electrical
influences; but perhaps my faint-heartedness is besides traceable to a
half-reasonable terror of a great storm in Herefordshire, where great
storms most do congregate, (such storms!) round the Malvern Hills,
those mountains of England. We lived four miles from their roots,
through all my childhood and early youth, in a Turkish house my father
built himself, crowded with minarets and domes, and crowned with metal
spires and crescents, to the provocation (as people used to observe)
of every lightning of heaven. Once a storm of storms happened, and we
all thought the house was struck--and a tree was so really, within two
hundred yards of the windows while I looked out--the bark, rent from
the top to the bottom ... torn into long ribbons by the dreadful fiery
hands, and dashed out into the air, over the heads of other trees, or
left twisted in their branches--torn into shreds in a moment, as a
flower might be, by a child! Did you ever see a tree after it has been
struck by lightning? The whole trunk of that tree was bare and
peeled--and up that new whiteness of it, ran the finger-mark of the
lightning in a bright beautiful rose-colour (none of your roses
brighter or more beautiful!) the fever-sign of the certain
death--though the branches themselves were for the most part
untouched, and spread from the peeled trunk in their full summer
foliage; and birds singing in them three hours afterwards! And, in
that same storm, two young women belonging to a festive party were
killed on the Malvern Hills--each sealed to death in a moment with a
sign on the chest which a common seal would cover--only the sign on
them was not rose-coloured as on our tree, but black as charred wood.
So I get 'possessed' sometimes with the effects of these impressions,
and so does one, at least, of my sisters, in a lower degree--and
oh!--how amusing and instructive all this is to you! When my father
came into the room to-day and found me hiding my eyes from the
lightning, he was quite angry and called 'it disgraceful to anybody
who had ever learnt the alphabet'--to which I answered humbly that 'I
knew it was'--but if I had been impertinent, I _might_ have added that
wisdom does not come by the alphabet but in spite of it? Don't you
think so in a measure? _non obstantibus_ Bradbury and Evans? There's a
profane question--and ungrateful too ... after the Duchess--I except
the Duchess and her peers--and be sure she will be the world's Duchess
and received as one of your most striking poems. Full of various power
the poem is.... I cannot say how deeply it has impressed me--but
though I want the conclusion, I don't _wish_ for it; and in this, am
reasonable for once! You will not write and make yourself ill--will
you? or read 'Sybil' at unlawful hours even? Are you better at all?
What a letter! and how very foolishly to-day