41
" Mind, if ever I go to England I shall have no heart to go out of a very dark corner. I shall just see you and that’s all. It’s only Robert who is a patriot now, of us two. England, what with the past and the present, is a place of bitterness to me, bitter enough to turn all her seas round to wormwood! Airs and hearts, all are against me in England; yet don’t let me be ungrateful. No love is forgotten or less prized, certainly not yours. Only I’m a citizeness of the world now, you see, and float loose. "
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
42
" By the way, I do hope you have some sympathy with me in my respect for the King of the French — that right kingly king, Louis Philippe. If France had borne more liberty, he would not have withheld it, and, for the rest, and in all truly royal qualities, he is the noblest king, according to my idea, in Europe — the most royal king in the encouragement of art and literature, and in the honoring of artists and men of letters. Let a young unknown writer accomplish a successful tragedy, and the next day he sits at the king’s table — not in a metaphor, but face to face. See how different the matter is in our court, where the artists are shown up the back stairs, and where no poet (even by the back stairs) can penetrate, unless so fortunate as to be a banker also. What is the use of kings and queens in these days, except to encourage arts and letters? Really I cannot see. "
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
43
" You have seen in the papers that Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer has had an accident in the arm, which keeps him away from the House of Commons, and even from the Haymarket, where they are acting his play (‘Not so bad as we seem’) with some success. Well, here is a curious thing about it. Mr. Lytton told us some time ago, that, by several clairvoyantes, without knowledge or connection with one another, an impending accident had been announced to him, ‘not fatal, but serious.’ Mr. Lytton said, ‘I have been very uneasy about it, and nervous as every letter arrived, but nearly three months having passed, I began to think they must have made a mistake — only it is curious that they all should all make a mistake of the same kind precisely. "
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
44
" while dearest Miss Mitford’s letters from the deathbed of her father make my heart ache as surely almost as the post comes. There is nothing more various in character, nothing which distinguishes one human being from another more strikingly, than the expression of feeling, the manner in which it influences the outward man. If I were in her circumstances, I should sit paralysed — it would be impossible to me to write or to cry. And she, who loves and feels with the intensity of a nature warm in everything, seems to turn to sympathy by the very instinct of grief, and sits at the deathbed of her last relative, writing there, in letter after letter, every symptom, physical or moral — "
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
47
" Arabel wants me to go to England, but as I did not last year my heart and nerves revolt from it now. Besides, we belong to the nonno and you this summer. Arabel can and, I dare say, will join us. And Milsand? You say ‘once in three years.’ Not quite so, I think. In any case, it has been far worse with some of mine. All the days of the three times of meeting in fourteen years, can only be multiplied together into three weeks; and this after a life of close union! Also, it was not her fault — she had not pecuniary means. I am bitter against myself for not having gone to England for a week or two in the Havre year. I could have done it, Robert would have let me. But now, no more. It was the war the year before last, and my unsteadiness of health last year, which kept us from our usual visit to you. This time we shall come. "
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
57
" It was during the years at Hope End that Elizabeth Barrett was first attacked by serious illness. ‘At fifteen,’ she says in her autobiographical letter, already quoted in part, ‘I nearly died;’ and this may be connected with a statement by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, to the effect that ‘one day, when Elizabeth was about fifteen, the young girl, impatient for her ride, tried to saddle her pony alone, in a field, and fell with the saddle upon her, in some way injuring her spine so seriously that she was for years upon her back.’ The latter part of this statement cannot indeed be quite accurate; for her period of long confinement to a sick-room was of later date, and began, according to her own statement, from a different cause. Mr. R. Barrett Browning states that the injury to the spine was not discovered for some time, but was afterwards attributed, not to a fall, but to a strain whilst tightening her pony’s girths. No doubt this injury contributed towards the general weakness of health to which she was always subject. "
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning