Day: July 15, 2018

[Postmark: July 15, 1846]

Wednesday Evening.

Well ! I anticipated your asking, I think, and told you
fully this morning. It was a chronicle I sent you, rather
than a letter. And nothing is left to tell you for I did
not go out all day . . nor yesterday. Which was wrong.
But I had visitor on visitor to-day, . . my old maid coming
to bring me her baby to look at, to Flush’s infinite delight.
Whenever she comes he devotes hmself to her, stays with
her down-stairs, lies on the corner of her gown, and, for the
most part, forbears going to sleep. To-morrow I mean to
go out . . to-morrow, when you are beginning to think
rather less of me.

Isn’t it ungrateful of me ? I think so.

I am glad, at least, that I do not appear to you ‘ sus-
picious.’ Because I dislike suspicious people myself, and
it has struck me often in the midst of the dislike . . ‘ That
is how I must appear to him.’ Ah but you are too
indulgent to me, my own dearest . . too dearest ! . . .
and you draw crooked inferences for me, shutting both the
eyes . . the near-sighted eye and far-sighted eye. Or is it,
in that strange sight of yours, that I walk between the far
and the near objects, in an invisible security ? Or is it
(which were best) that I am too near to be seen even by
the near-sighted eye, . . like a hand brought close to the
eyelashes, which, for over-closeness, nobody can see ? Let
me be too near to be seen always too near ! dearest,
dearest ! Never will I complain that you do not see me !
Be sure of that, now.

Once I used to be more uneasy, and to think that I
ought to make you see me. But Love is better than Sight,
and Love will do without Sight. Which I did not under-
stand at first. I knew it was enough for me, that you
should love me. That it was enough for you, I had to learn
afterwards.

And ‘ Grateful ‘ is my word and not yours. I am
grateful to you, if to owe you all the sense of life, all the
renewal of hope, all the possibility of happiness . . if to
owe these things to another, consciously, feelingly, shall
pass for gratitude, . . then I am grateful to you, Robert.

Do you not know it, that I should say it again ? For me,
it seems to me that I can do nothing in return. To love
you ! Why no woman in the world could do less.

I am glad, both for the public and Tennyson, that his
poems sell so well and presently you will do as well or
better and I, half as well perhaps ; so that we shall be
too rich, which will spoil it all . . won’t it ?

Mr. Horne sent me the Daily News to-day, . . the
number containing his verses on Haydon . . and I cut
from it an advertisement, for the purpose of bidding you
observe that the land journey, or river-voyage, is very much
cheaper than the sea-voyage by the steamers unless the
direct vessel to Leghorn should go as last year, and I fear
it will not. The steamer-charges of the Oriental company
are immense. Nineteen guineas to Gibraltar even !
Twenty-eight, I think, to Naples. As for the advertisement,
I send it only for what it suggests. And there is time
enough for calculations, all ways suggestible.

May God bless you, dear, dear ! How is the head ?
Shall it be better, without me, until Saturday ? Say how
it is.

Among all my visitors, the only one I expected, never
came ! No Mrs. Jameson again to-day !

Dearest, I am your very own

BA.

[Postmark: July 15, 1846]

Wednesday.

Dearest Ba, I am anxious to know what cannot yet be
told me, how that unforeseen visit has worked tell me the
moment you can, and fully, whatever happens.

‘ Suspicious ‘ anything in the world rather than that,
you are ! When you have mistrusted your own power over
me, I believed always in the mistrust . . which, indeed,
matters little except to yourself. For if I would, certainly,
have the truth seen as the truth, and our true position
understood, yet . . there is, ought I not to be ashamed
at saying ? an exquisite, final grace and endearingness in
the ignorance, strange as I must account it. You doubly
trust me, with the treasure, and then, with the knowledge
that it is a treasure, or such a treasure.

Ba, when I think of it all, my whole heart becomes one
gratitude to you, I am only yours, grateful for ever. It is
the only kind of thoughts in which you shall not share
(there are many in which you cannot) the thoughts to my
inmost self as I go over what you say and do and try to
clear up to myself the precise fascination in each : you shall
not know what you do . . but shall continue to do and to
let me know. I love you entirely. Where can you change
so that I shall not love you more and more as I grow more
able and worthier ? I cannot sit for twenty-four hours by
you as I sit for three as it is, I take myself to task for not
doing something here at home to justify in some measure
my privilege and blessing and the only thing that keeps
conscience quiet comparatively is . . the old expedient
that the Future engages to do for me what the Present
cannot. Under your eyes, I will hope to work and attain
your approval. I know that when you were only the great
Poet and not my Ba, I would have preferred your praise, as
competent to praise, to that of the whole world I
remember distinctly, and know I should have done so.

And now, if I put aside the Poet and only (what an ‘ only ‘)
see my dearest, dearest lady of that hair and eyes, and
hands, and voice, and all the completeness that was trusted
to my arms yesterday why I feel that if she, never having
written a line, said ‘ What Miss Barrett may think I do
not know, but I am content with what you show me ‘ then,
dearest, should not I be content ?

I called on Moxon and called at Carlyle’s to no pur-
pose. He was out, and will leave town (said the servant)
next Saturday. Mrs. Carlyle has already left it. So, no
Rag Fair for the present, or probably ever ! This was my
fault, I having let several Sundays go by I must write to
Mr. Kenyon and try if he will come on his own account.
Moxon tells me that he has sold fifteen hundred of Tenny-
son’s Poems in a year and is about to print another
edition in consequence. If that is the case, and Tennyson
gets, say, only half a crown by the sale of each copy,
expenses deducted, he will have received 178/., little
enough, as payments are made to Punch-literature, but
enough to live upon, whatever the awful fiat decides !
Tennyson ‘is going’ to Switzerland presently with Moxon
but is liable to fits of indecision. He did talk of going to
Italy (of course), but the other day, time being up, his
brother was forced to proceed alone. Moxon is coming
here first.

Now I will kiss you, dearest, and hope that Wimpole
Street stands where it did, unhurt by explosions of any-
kind. I have got a letter from Procter asking me to go to-
day, which I cannot do. Ever your own, very own R.

[Postmark: July 15, 1846]

Wednesday Morning.

And is it true of to-day as you said it would be, ever
dearest, that you wish to be with me? Let me have the
comfort, or luxury rather, of the thought of it, before to-
morrow takes you a step farther off.

At dinner my aunt said to Papa.. ‘I have not seen
Ba all day and when I went to her room, to my astonish-
ment a gentleman was sitting there.’ ‘Who was that?’ said
Papa’s eyes to Arabel ‘Mr. Browning called here to-day,’
she answered ‘And Ba bowed her head,’ continued my
aunt, ‘as if she meant to signify to me that I was not to
come in’- ‘ Oh,’ cried Henrietta, ‘that must have been
a mistake of yours. Perhaps she meant just the contrary.’
‘You should have gone in,’ Papa said, ‘and seen the poet.’
Now if she really were to do that the next time! Yet I
did not, you know, make the expelling gesture she thought
she saw. Simply I was startled. As to Saturday we must
try whether we cannot defend the position.. set the
guns against the approaches to right and left.. we must
try.

In speaking too of your visit this morning, Stormy
said to her.. ‘Oh Mr. Browning is a great friend of
Ba’s! He comes here twice a week is it twice a week or
once, Arabel?’

While I write, the Hedleys come and Mrs. Hedley is
beseeching me into seeing Mr. Bevan, whom perhaps I must
see, notwithstanding Flush’s wrongs.

By the way, I made quite clear to Flush that you
left the cakes, and they were very graciously received
indeed.

Dearest, since the last word was written, Mrs. Hedley
came back leading Mr. Bevan, and Papa who had just
entered the room found the door shut upon him.. I was

nervous.. oh, so nervous! and the six feet, and some-
thing more, of Mr. Bevan seemed to me as if they never
would end, so tall the man is. Well and he sate down
by me according to my aunt’s arrangement; and I, who
began to talk a thousand miles from any such subject, with
a good reason for the precaution, found myself thrown
head-foremost into ecclesiastical architecture at the close of
about three minutes how he got there all his saints know
best! It’s his subject.. par excellence. He talks to
Arabella about arches and mullions he can’t talk of any-
thing else, I suspect. And because the Trinity is ex-
pressed in such a form of church-building, the altar at the
east, and the baptistery at the door, .. there’s no other
lawful form of a church, none at all! Not that he has an
opinion! he ‘adopts opinions,’ but would not think for
himself for the world at the risk of ultimate damnation!
Which was the amount of his talk to-day.. and really it
does not strike me as wisdom, now that I set it down so.
Yet the man expressed himself well and has a sensible face
he is a clever third-class man, I think better than the
mass for sense, but commonplace essentially. Only,
inasmuch as ecclesiastical architecture is not my subject,
I may think otherwise of him when I know him otherwise.
I do not dislike him now. And then I am conscious how
you spoil me for common men, dearest! It is scarcely fair
on them.

My aunt (Mrs. Hedley) said when she introduced him:
‘You are to understand this to be a great honour for
she never lets anybody come here except Mr. Kenyon, ..
and a few other gentlemen’… (laughing). Said Papa
‘Only one other gentleman, indeed. Only Mr. Browning,
the poet the man of the pomegranates.’ Was that likely
to calm me, do you think? How late it is I must break
off. To-night I shall write again. Dearest beloved,

I am your own always.