Robert Browning - The Complete Works of Robert Browning - Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition

Tuesday Evening.

Dear Miss Haworth, — Do look at a fuchsia in full bloom and notice the clear little honey-drop depending from every flower. I have just found it out to my no small satisfaction, — a bee’s breakfast. I only answer for the long-blossomed sort, though, — indeed, for this plant in my room. Taste and be Titania; you can, that is. All this while I forget that you will perhaps never guess the good of the discovery: I have, you are to know, such a love for flowers and leaves — some leaves — that I every now and then, in an impatience at being able to possess myself of them thoroughly, to see them quite, satiate myself with their scent, — bite them to bits — so there will be some sense in that. How I remember the flowers — even grasses — of places I have seen! Some one flower or weed, I should say, that gets some strangehow connected with them.

Snowdrops and Tilsit in Prussia go together; cowslips and Windsor Park, for instance; flowering palm and some place or other in Holland.

Now to answer what can be answered in the letter I was happy to receive last week. I am quite well. I did not expect you would write, — for none of your written reasons, however. You will see ‘Sordello’ in a trice, if the fagging fit holds. I did not write six lines while absent (except a scene in a play, jotted down as we sailed thro’ the Straits of Gibraltar) — but I did hammer out some four, two of which are addressed to you, two to the Queen *— the whole to go in Book III — perhaps. I called you ‘Eyebright’ — meaning a simple and sad sort of translation of “Euphrasia” into my own language: folks would know who Euphrasia, or Fanny, was — and I should not know Ianthe or Clemanthe. Not that there is anything in them to care for, good or bad. Shall I say ‘Eyebright’?

*I know no lines directly addressed to the Queen.

I was disappointed in one thing, Canova.

What companions should I have?

The story of the ship must have reached you ‘with a difference’ as Ophelia says; my sister told it to a Mr. Dow, who delivered it to Forster, I suppose, who furnished Macready with it, who made it over &c., &c., &c. — As short as I can tell, this way it happened: the captain woke me one bright Sunday morning to say there was a ship floating keel uppermost half a mile off; they lowered a boat, made ropes fast to some floating canvas, and towed her towards our vessel. Both met halfway, and the little air that had risen an hour or two before, sank at once. Our men made the wreck fast in high glee at having ‘new trousers out of the sails,’ and quite sure she was a French boat, broken from her moorings at Algiers, close by. Ropes were next hove (hang this sea-talk!) round her stanchions, and after a quarter of an hour’s pushing at the capstan, the vessel righted suddenly, one dead body floating out; five more were in the forecastle, and had probably been there a month under a blazing African sun — don’t imagine the wretched state of things. They were, these six, the ‘watch below’ — (I give you the result of the day’s observation) — the rest, some eight or ten, had been washed overboard at first. One or two were Algerines, the rest Spaniards. The vessel was a smuggler bound for Gibraltar; there were two stupidly disproportionate guns, taking up the whole deck, which was convex and — nay, look you! (a rough pen-and-ink sketch of the different parts of the wreck is here introduced) these are the gun-rings, and the black square the place where the bodies lay. (All the ‘bulwarks’ or sides of the top, carried away by the waves.) Well, the sailors covered up the hatchway, broke up the aft-deck, hauled up tobacco and cigars, such heaps of them, and then bale after bale of prints and chintz, don’t you call it, till the captain was half-frightened — he would get at the ship’s papers, he said; so these poor fellows were pulled up, piecemeal, and pitched into the sea, the very sailors calling to each other to ‘cover the faces’, — no papers of importance were found, however, but fifteen swords, powder and ball enough for a dozen such boats, and bundles of cotton, &c., that would have taken a day to get out, but the captain vowed that after five o’clock she should be cut adrift: accordingly she was cast loose, not a third of her cargo having been touched; and you hardly can conceive the strange sight when the battered hulk turned round, actually, and looked at us, and then reeled off, like a mutilated creature from some scoundrel French surgeon’s lecture-table, into the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world: there; only thank me for not taking you at your word, and giving you the whole ‘story’. — ’What I did?’ I went to Trieste, then Venice — then through Treviso and Bassano to the mountains, delicious Asolo, all my places and castles, you will see. Then to Vicenza, Padua, and Venice again. Then to Verona, Trent, Innspruck (the Tyrol), Munich, Salzburg in Franconia, Frankfort and Mayence; down the Rhine to Cologne, then to Aix-la-Chapelle, Liege and Antwerp — then home. Shall you come to town, anywhere near town, soon? I shall be off again as soon as my book is out, whenever that will be.

I never read that book of Miss Martineau’s, so can’t understand what you mean. Macready is looking well; I just saw him the other day for a minute after the play; his Kitely was Kitely — superb from his flat cap down to his shining shoes. I saw very few Italians, ‘to know’, that is. Those I did see I liked. Your friend Pepoli has been lecturing here, has he not?

I shall be vexed if you don’t write soon, a long Elstree letter. 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.