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
I am yours,
E.B.B.