Forster sent a note last evening urging me to go and dine with him and Leigh Hunt to-day,—there was no refusing. There is sunshine—you may have been down-stairs—but the wind continues.
I shall know to-morrow—but surely a letter is to come presently—let me wait a little.
Nothing! Pray write if anything have happened, my own Ba!
No time—Ever your
E.B.B. to R.B.
Friday.
[Post-mark, May 1, 1846.]
I am delighted with the verses and quite surprised by Mr. Arnould’s, having expected to find nothing but love and law in them, and really there is a great deal besides. Hard to believe, it was, that a university prize poet (who was not Tennyson) could write such good verses: but he wrote them of you, and that was enough inspiration for him, I suppose, as it would be for others, my own dearest. How I delight in hearing you praised!—it is such a delightful assent to the word which is in me, in the deepest of me. You know that mysterious pleasure we have, in listening to echoes!—we hear nothing new, nothing we have not said ourselves—yet we stand on the side of the hill and listen ... listen ... as if to the oracles of Delphi. The very pleasure of it all is in the repetition ... the reverberation.
When you had gone yesterday and I had taken my coffee, holding my book ... ‘La Gorgone’ a sea-romance by Landelle, (those little duodecimo books are the only possible books to hold in one’s hand at coffee-times ... and the people at Rolandi’s library sent me this, which is not worth much, I think, but quite new and very marine) ... holding my book at one page, as if fixed ... transfixed, ... by a sudden eternity, ... well, after all that was done with, coffee and all, ... in came George, and told me that the day before he had seen Tennyson at Mr. Venables’ house, or chambers rather. Mr. Venables was unwell, and George went to see him, and while he was there, came the poet. He had left London for a few days, he said, and meant to stay here for a time ... ‘hating it perfectly’ like your Donne ... ‘seeming to detest London,’ said George ... ‘abusing everything in unmeasured words.’ Then he had been dining at Dickens’s, and meeting various celebrities, and Dickens had asked him to go with him (Dickens) to Switzerland, where he [is] going, to write his new work: ‘but,’ laughed Tennyson, ‘if I went, I should be entreating him to dismiss his sentimentality, and so we should quarrel and part, and never see one another any more. It was better to decline—and I have declined.’ When George had told his story, I enquired if Tennyson was what was called an agreeable man—happy in conversation. And the reply was ... ‘yes—but quite inferior to Browning! He neither talks so well,’ observed George with a grave consideration and balancing of the sentences, ... ‘nor has so frank and open a manner. The advantages are all on Browning’s side, I should say.’ Now dear George is a little criticised you must know in this house for his official gravity and dignity—my sisters murmur at him very much sometimes ... poor dear George!—but he is good and kind, and high and right minded, as we all know, and I, for my part, never thought of criticising him yesterday when he said those words rather ... perhaps ... barristerially, ... had they been other words.
My other words must go by my next letter—I am to write to you again presently, you are to be pleased to remember ... and that letter may reach you, for aught I can guess, at the same moment with this. In the meantime, ever beloved,