The Love Letters of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Author:Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620873663
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing

3 May 1845. Browning, Robert to Browning, Elizabeth Barrett.

London

Saturday Morning

Now shall you see what you shall see—here shall be “sound speech not to be reproved,”—for this morning you are to know that the soul of me has it all her own way, dear Miss Barrett, this green cool nine-in-the morning time for my chesnut-tree over there, and for me who only coaxed my goodnatured—(really)—body up, after its three-hours night-rest on condition it should lounge, or creep about, incognito and without consequences-and so it shall, all but my right-hand which is half-spirit and “cuts” its poor relations, and passes itself off for somebody (that is, some soul) and is doubly active & ready on such occasions— Now I shall tell you all about it, first what that last letter meant, and then more. You are to know, then, that for some reason, that looked like an instinct, I thought I ought not to send shaft on shaft, letter-plague on letter, with such an uninterrupted clanging … that I ought to wait, say a week at least, having killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your dogs: but not being exactly Phoibos Apollon, you are to know further that when I did think I might go modestly on, … ωμoι, let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocation of ancles! Plainly, from waiting and turning my eyes away (not from you, but from you in your special capacity of being written-to, not spoken-to)—when I turned again you had grown— formidable somehow—tho’ that’s not the word,—nor are you the person, either,—it was my fortune, my privilege of being your friend this one way, that it seemed a shame for me to make no better use of than by taking it up with talk about books and I don’t know what: write what I will, you would read for once, I think—well, then,—what I shall write shall be—something on this book, and the other book, and my own books, and Mary Howitt’s books, and at the end of it—good bye, and I hope here is a quarter of an hour rationally spent. So the thought of what I should find in my heart to say, and the contrast with what I suppose I ought to say … all these things are against me. But this is very foolish, all the same, I need not be told—and is part & parcel of an older—indeed primitive folly of mine, which I shall never wholly get rid of, of desiring to do nothing when I cannot do all,—seeing nothing, getting, enjoying nothing, where there is no seeing & getting & enjoying wholly—and in this case, moreover, you are you, and know something about me, if not much, and have read Bos on the art of supplying Ellipses, and (after, particularly, I have confessed all this, why & how it has been) you will subaudire when I pull out my Mediæval-Gothic-Architectural-Manuscript (so it was, I remember now) and

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