第28章 Chapter 7(2)

What are you doing,writing --drawing?

Ever yours truly R.B.

To Miss Haworth,Barham Lodge,Elstree.

Miss Browning's account of this experience,supplied from memory of her brother's letters and conversations,contains some vivid supplementary details.The drifting away of the wreck put probably no effective distance between it and the ship;hence the necessity of 'sailing away'from it.

'Of the dead pirates,one had his hands clasped as if praying;another,a severe gash in his head.The captain burnt disinfectants and blew gunpowder,before venturing on board,but even then,he,a powerful man,turned very sick with the smell and sight.

They stayed one whole day by the side,but the sailors,in spite of orders,began to plunder the cigars,&c.The captain said privately to Robert,"I cannot restrain my men,and they will bring the plague into our ship,so I mean quietly in the night to sail away."Robert took two cutlasses and a dagger;they were of the coarsest workmanship,intended for use.At the end of one of the sheaths was a heavy bullet,so that it could be used as a sling.The day after,to their great relief,a heavy rain fell and cleansed the ship.Captain Davidson reported the sight of the wreck and its condition as soon as he arrived at Trieste.'

Miss Browning also relates that the weather was stormy in the Bay of Biscay,and for the first fortnight her brother suffered terribly.The captain supported him on to the deck as they passed through the Straits of Gibraltar,that he might not lose the sight.He recovered,as we know,sufficiently to write 'How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix';but we can imagine in what revulsion of feeling towards firm land and healthy motion this dream of a headlong gallop was born in him.

The poem was pencilled on the cover of Bartoli's "De'Simboli trasportati al Morale",a favourite book and constant companion of his;and,in spite of perfect effacement as far as the sense goes,the pencil dints are still visible.The little poem 'Home Thoughts from the Sea'was written at the same time,and in the same manner.

By the time they reached Trieste,the captain,a rough north-countryman,had become so attached to Mr.Browning that he offered him a free passage to Constantinople;and after they had parted,carefully preserved,by way of remembrance,a pair of very old gloves worn by him on deck.Mr.Browning might,on such an occasion,have dispensed with gloves altogether;but it was one of his peculiarities that he could never endure to be out of doors with uncovered hands.

The captain also showed his friendly feeling on his return to England by bringing to Miss Browning,whom he had heard of through her brother,a present of six bottles of attar of roses.

The inspirations of Asolo and Venice appear in 'Pippa Passes'

and 'In a Gondola';but the latter poem showed,to Mr.Browning's subsequent vexation,that Venice had been imperfectly seen;and the magnetism which Asolo was to exercise upon him,only fully asserted itself at a much later time.

A second letter to Miss Haworth is undated,but may have been written at any period of this or the ensuing year.

I have received,a couple of weeks since,a present --an album large and gaping,and as Cibber's Richard says of the 'fair Elizabeth':

'My heart is empty --she shall fill it'--so say I (impudently?)of my grand trouble-table,which holds a sketch or two by my fine fellow Monclar,one lithograph --his own face of faces,--'all the rest was amethyst.'F.H.everywhere!not a soul beside 'in the chrystal silence there,'and it locks,this album;now,don't shower drawings on M.,who has so many advantages over me as it is:

or at least don't bid ME of all others say what he is to have.

The 'Master'is somebody you don't know,W.J.Fox,a magnificent and poetical nature,who used to write in reviews when I was a boy,and to whom my verses,a bookful,written at the ripe age of twelve and thirteen,were shown:which verses he praised not a little;which praise comforted me not a little.Then I lost sight of him for years and years;then I published ANONYMOUSLY a little poem --which he,to my inexpressible delight,praised and expounded in a gallant article in a magazine of which he was the editor;then I found him out again;he got a publisher for 'Paracelsus'

(I read it to him in manu)and is in short 'my literary father'.

Pretty nearly the same thing did he for Miss Martineau,as she has said somewhere.God knows I forget what the 'talk',table-talk was about --I think she must have told you the results of the whole day we spent tete-a-tete at Ascot,and that day's,the dinner-day's morning at Elstree and St.Albans.

She is to give me advice about my worldly concerns,and not before I need it!

I cannot say or sing the pleasure your way of writing gives me --do go on,and tell me all sorts of things,'the story'for a beginning;but your moralisings on 'your age'and the rest,are --now what ARE they?

not to be reasoned on,disputed,laughed at,grieved about:

they are 'Fanny's crotchets'.I thank thee,Jew (lia),for teaching me that word.

I don't know that I shall leave town for a month:my friend Monclar looks piteous when I talk of such an event.I can't bear to leave him;he is to take my portrait to-day (a famous one he HAS taken!)and very like he engages it shall be.I am going to town for the purpose....

Now,then,do something for me,and see if I'll ask Miss M----to help you!

I am going to begin the finishing 'Sordello'--and to begin thinking a Tragedy (an Historical one,so I shall want heaps of criticisms on 'Strafford')and I want to have ANOTHER tragedy in prospect,I write best so provided:I had chosen a splendid subject for it,when I learned that a magazine for next,this,month,will have a scene founded on my story;vulgarizing or doing no good to it:and I accordingly throw it up.I want a subject of the most wild and passionate love,to contrast with the one I mean to have ready in a short time.I have many half-conceptions,floating fancies:give me your notion of a thorough self-devotement,self-forgetting;should it be a woman who loves thus,or a man?What circumstances will best draw out,set forth this feeling?...