And, for the rest, I am proud to remain

Your obliged and faithful

ELIZABETH B. BARRETT.

Robert Browning, Esq. 
  New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey.

R.B. to E.B.B.

New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey. 
Jan. 13, 1845.

Dear Miss Barrett,—­I just shall say, in as few words as I can, that you make me very happy, and that, now the beginning is over, I dare say I shall do better, because my poor praise, number one, was nearly as felicitously brought out, as a certain tribute to no less a personage than Tasso, which I was amused with at Rome some weeks ago, in a neat pencilling on the plaister-wall by his tomb at Sant’Onofrio—­’Alla cara memoria—­di—­(please fancy solemn interspaces and grave capital letters at the new lines) di—­Torquato Tasso—­il Dottore Bernardini—­offriva—­il seguente Carme—­O tu’—­and no more,—­the good man, it should seem, breaking down with the overload of love here!  But my ’O tu’—­was breathed out most sincerely, and now you have taken it in gracious part, the rest will come after.  Only,—­and which is why I write now—­it looks as if I have introduced some phrase or other about ‘your faults’ so cleverly as to give exactly the opposite meaning to what I meant, which was, that in my first ardour I had thought to tell you of everything which impressed me in your verses, down, even, to whatever ‘faults’ I could find,—­a good earnest, when I had got to them, that I had left out not much between—­as if some Mr. Fellows were to say, in the overflow of his first enthusiasm of rewarded adventure:  ’I will describe you all the outer life and ways of these Lycians, down to their very sandal-thongs,’ whereto the be-corresponded one rejoins—­’Shall I get next week, then, your dissertation on sandal-thongs’?  Yes, and a little about the ‘Olympian Horses,’ and God-charioteers as well!

What ‘struck me as faults,’ were not matters on the removal of which, one was to have—­poetry, or high poetry,—­but the very highest poetry, so I thought, and that, to universal recognition.  For myself, or any artist, in many of the cases there would be a positive loss of time, peculiar artist’s pleasure—­for an instructed eye loves to see where the brush has dipped twice in a lustrous colour, has lain insistingly along a favourite outline, dwelt lovingly in a grand shadow; for these ‘too muches’ for the everybody’s picture are so many helps to the making out the real painter’s picture as he had it in his brain.  And all of the Titian’s Naples Magdalen must have once been golden in its degree to justify that heap of hair in her hands—­the only gold effected now!