| dc.description.transcription | My dear friend
At length has arrived Ollier’s parcel & with it the portrait. What a delightful present! It is almost yourself, & we sate talking with it & of it all the evening. There wants nothing but that deepest & most earnest look with which you sometimes draw aside the inner veil of your nature when you talk with us, & the liquid lustre of the eyes..But it is an admirable portrait & admirably expresses you, -- it is a great pleasure to us to posess [sic] it – a pleasure in a time of need, coming to us when there are few others. How we wish that it were you, & not your picture!—how I wish that we were with you!
This parcel you know & all its letters are now a year old—some older, there are all kind of dates from March to August 1818, & “your date” to use Shakespeare’s expression “is better in your pie or your pudding than in your” letter: Virginity Parolles says, but letters are the same thing in another shape.
With it came too, Lamb’s works—I have looked at none of the other books yet.—What a lovely thing in his Rosamund Gray, how much knowledge of the sweetest & the deepest part of our nature in it! When I think of such a mind as Lamb’s when I see how unnoticed remain things of such exquisite & complete perfection what should I hope for myself if I had not higher objects in view than fame.—
I have seen too little of Italy & of Pictures. Perhaps Peacock has shewn you some of my letters to him. But at Rome I was [p. 2] very ill, seldom able to go out without a carriage, & though I kept horses for two months there, yet there is so much to see. Perhaps I attended more to Sculpture than Painting, its forms being more easily intelligible than those of the latter. Yet I saw the famous works of Raphael, to [deleted] whom I agree with the whole world in thinking the finest painter Why I can tell you another time. With respect to Michael Angelo [sic] I dissent, & think with astonishment & indignation on the common notion that he equals & in some respects exceeds Raphael. He seems to me to have no sense of moral dignity & loveliness; & the energy for which he has been so much praised appears to me to be a certain rude, external, mechanical quality in comparison with any thing possessed by Raphael.—or even much inferior artists. His famous painting in the Sixtine [sic] Chapel seems to me as [deleted] deficient in beauty and majesty both in the conception & the execution; it might have combined all the forms of terror & delight -- & it is a dull & wicked emblem of a dull & wicked thing. Jesus Christ is like an angry pot-boy & God like an old alehousekeeper looking out of a window. He has been called the Dante of painting—but if we find some of the gross & strong [a word superscribed with another word] outlines which are employed in the most [deleted] few most distasteful passages of the Inferno, where shall we find your Francesca, where the Spirit coming over the sea in a boat like Mars rising from the vapours of the horizon, where Matilda gathering flowers, and all the exquisite tenderness & sensibility & ideal beauty, in which Dante excelled all poets except Shakespeare? As to Michael Angelo’s Moses—but you have a cast of that in [p. 3] England.—I write to [deleted] these things heaven knows why—
I have written something & finished it—different from anything else & a new attempt for me,--& I mean to dedicate it to you. I should not have done so without your approbation, but I asked your picture last night & it smiled assent – If I did not think it in some degree worthy of you, I would not make you a public offering of it—I expect to have to write to you soon about it – If Ollier is not turned Christian, Jew, or become infected with the Murrain he will publish it.—Don’t let him be frightened, for it is nothing which by any courtesy of language can be termed either moral or immoral.
Mary has written to Marianne for a parcel in which I beg you would make Ollier inclose what you know would much interest me. Your Calendar a sweet extract from which I saw in the Examiner), & the other poems belonging to you—and for some friends of mine—my Eclogue. This parcel which must be sent instantly will reach me by October. But don’t trust letters to it, except just a line or so. If [deleted] When you write, write by the Post
Ever your affectionate PBS
[p 4] We have a friend here a Mrs. Gisborne who teaches me Spanish & is very much in love both with the portrait & the character of our best friend [slanted long dash]
One letter has been sent addressed 8 York Street instead of York Buildings. –Inquire for it if it has not come to hand | |
