_E.B.B. to R.B._
January 1, 1845 [1846].
How good you are--how best! it is a favourite play of my memory to
take up the thought of what you were to me (to my mind gazing!) years
ago, as the poet in an abstraction--then the thoughts of you, a little
clearer, in concrete personality, as Mr. Kenyon's friend, who had
dined with him on such a day, or met him at dinner on such another,
and said some great memorable thing 'on Wednesday last,' and enquired
kindly about _me_ perhaps on Thursday,--till I was proud! and so, the
thoughts of you, nearer and nearer (yet still afar!) as the Mr.
Browning who meant to do me the honour of writing to me, and who did
write; and who asked me once in a letter (does he remember?) 'not to
lean out of the window while his foot was on the stair!'--to take up
all those thoughts, and more than those, one after another, and tie
them together with all _these_, which cannot be named so easily--which
cannot be classed in botany and Greek. It is a nosegay of mystical
flowers, looking strangely and brightly, and keeping their May-dew
through the Christmases--better than even _your_ flowers! And I am not
'ashamed' of mine, ... be very sure! no!
For the siren, I never suggested to you any such thing--why you do not
pretend to have read such a suggestion in my letter certainly. _That_
would have been most exemplarily modest of me! would it not, O
Ulysses?
And you meant to write, ... you _meant_! and went to walk in 'Poet's
lane' instead, (in the 'Aonius of Highgate') which I remember to have
read of--does not Hunt speak of it in his Memoirs?--and so now there
is another track of light in the traditions of the place, and people
may talk of the pomegranate-smell between the hedges. So you really
have _hills_ at New Cross, and not hills by courtesy? I was at
Hampstead once--and there was something attractive to me in that
fragment of heath with its wild smell, thrown down ... like a Sicilian
rose from Proserpine's lap when the car drove away, ... into all that
arid civilization, 'laurel-clumps and invisible visible fences,' as
you say!--and the grand, eternal smoke rising up in the distance, with
its witness against nature! People grew severely in jest about cockney
landscape--but is it not true that the trees and grass in the close
neighbourhood of great cities must of necessity excite deeper emotion
than the woods and valleys will, a hundred miles off, where human
creatures ruminate stupidly as the cows do, the 'county families'
es-_chewing_ all men who are not 'landed proprietors,' and the farmers
never looking higher than to the fly on the uppermost turnip-leaf! Do
you know at all what English country-life is, which the English praise
so, and 'moralize upon into a thousand similes,' as that one greatest,
purest, noblest thing in the world--the purely English and excellent
thing? It is to my mind simply and purely abominable, and I would
rather live in a street than be forced to live it out,--that English
country-life; for I don't mean life in the country. The social
exigencies--why, nothing _can_ be so bad--nothing! That is the way by
which Englishmen grow up to top the world in their peculiar line of
respectable absurdities.
Think of my talking so as if I could be vexed with any one of them!
_I!_--On the contrary I wish them all a happy new year to abuse one
another, or visit each of them his nearest neighbour whom he hates,
three times a week, because 'the distance is so convenient,' and give
great dinners in noble rivalship (venison from the Lord Lieutenant
against turbot from London!), and talk popularity and game-law by
turns to the tenantry, and beat down tithes to the rector. This
glorious England of ours; with its peculiar glory of the rural
districts! And _my_ glory of patriotic virtue, who am so happy in
spite of it all, and make a pretence of talking--talking--while I
think the whole time of your letter. I think of your letter--I am no
more a patriot than _that_!
May God bless you, best and dearest! You say things to me which I am
not worthy to listen to for a moment, even if I was deaf dust the next
moment.... I confess it humbly and earnestly as before God.
Yet He knows,--if the entireness of a gift means anything,--that I
have not given with a reserve, that I am yours in my life and soul,
for this year and for other years. Let me be used _for_ you rather
than _against_ you! and that unspeakable, immeasurable grief of
feeling myself a stone in your path, a cloud in your sky, may I be
saved from it!--pray it for _me_ ... for _my_ sake rather than
_yours_. For the rest, I thank you, I thank you. You will be always to
me, what to-day you are--and that is all!--!