Thursday Morning.
September 11, 1845.
Here are your beautiful, and I am sure true sonnets; they look true – – I remember the light hair, I find. And who paints, and dares exhibit, E.B.B.’s self? And surely ‘Alfred’s’ pencil has not foregone its best privilege, not left the face unsketched? Italians call such an ‘effect defective’ – – ‘l’andar a Roma senza vedere il Papa.’ He must have begun by seeing his Holiness, I know, and . . . he will not trust me with the result, that my sister may copy it for me, because we are strangers, he and I, and I could give him nothing, nothing like the proper price for it – – but you would lend it to me, I think, nor need I do more than thank you in my usual effective and very eloquent way – – for I have already been allowed to visit you seventeen times, do you know; and this last letter of yours, fiftieth is the same! So all my pride is gone, pride in that sense – – and I mean to take of you for ever, and reconcile myself with my lot in this life. Could, and would, you give me such a sketch? It has been on my mind to ask you ever since I knew you if nothing in the way of good portrait existed – – and this occasion bids me speak out, I dare believe: the more, that you have also quieted – – have you not? – – another old obstinate and very likely impertinent questioning of mine – – as to the little name which was neither Orinda, nor Sacharissa (for which thank providence) and is never to appear in books, though you write them. Now I know it and write it – – ‘Ba’ – – and thank you, and your brother George, and only burned his kind letter because you bade me who know best. So, wish by wish, one gets one’s wishes – – at least I do – – for one instance, you will go to Italy
Why, ‘lean and harken after it’ as Donne says – –
Don’t expect Neapolitan Scenery at Pisa, quite in the North, remember. Mrs. Shelley found Italy for the first time, real Italy, at Sorrento, she says. Oh that book – – does one wake or sleep? The ‘Mary dear’ with the brown eyes, and Godwin’s daughter and Shelley’s wife, and who surely was something better once upon a time – – and to go through Rome and Florence and the rest, after what I suppose to be Lady Londonderry’s fashion: the intrepidity of the commonplace quite astounds me. And then that way, when she and the like of her are put in a new place, with new flowers, new stones, faces, walls, all new – – of looking wisely up at the sun, clouds, evening star, or mountain top and wisely saying ‘who shall describe that sight!’ – – Not you, we very well see – – but why don’t you tell us that at Rome they eat roasted chestnuts, and put the shells into their aprons, the women do, and calmly empty the whole on the heads of the passengers in the street below; and that at Padua when a man drives his waggon up to a house and stops, all the mouse-coloured oxen that pull it from a beam against their foreheads sit down in a heap and rest. But once she travelled the country with Shelley on arm; now she plods it, Rogers in hand – – to such things and uses may we come at last! Her remarks on art, once she lets go of Rio’s skirts, are amazing – – Fra Angelico, for instance, only painted Martyrs, Virgins &c., she had no eyes for the divine bon-bourgeoisie of his pictures; the dear common folk of his crowds, those who sit and listen (spectacle at nose and bent into a comfortable heap to hear better) at the sermon of the Saint – – and the children, and women, – – divinely pure they all are, but fresh from the streets and market place – – but she is wrong every where, that is, not right, not seeing what is to see, speaking what one expects to hear – – I quarrel with her, for ever, I think.
I am much better, and mean to be well as you desire – – shall correct the verses you have seen, and make them do for the present.
Saturday, then! And one other time only, do you say?
God bless you, my own, best friend.
Yours ever
R.B.