Facsimile of Letter of Robert Browning
E.B.B. to R.B.
Monday.
[Post-mark, November 11, 1845.]
If it were possible that you could do me harm in the way of work, (but it isn't) it would be possible, not through writing letters and reading manuscripts, but because of a reason to be drawn from your own great line
What man is strong until he stands alone?
What man ... what woman? For have I not felt twenty times the desolate advantage of being insulated here and of not minding anybody when I made my poems?—of living a little like a disembodied spirit, and caring less for suppositious criticism than for the black fly buzzing in the pane?—That made me what dear Mr. Kenyon calls 'insolent,'—untimid, and unconventional in my degree; and not so much by strength, you see, as by separation. You touch your greater ends by mere strength; breaking with your own hands the hampering threads which, in your position would have hampered me.