2. Though his letters to her do not survive, TC wrote in similar vein to Elizabeth Barrett at this time. She had sent him her
Poems, 2 vols., pbd. mid-Aug., along with a letter on 14 Aug., to which he replied, ca. 18 Aug. She then apparently sent a second letter, now lost, which brought a further reply from TC, ca. 20 Aug., and a third in which she said, “[Y]our kindness has touched me deeply—more deeply than I shall venture to express here.”
To Mary Russell Mitford she wrote, 1 Sept.: “I have had kind letters from Carlyle, who told me that a person of my ‘insight and veracity’ ought to use ‘speech’ rather
than ‘song’ in these days of crisis. … He had not read all the poems when he wrote” (Elizabeth Barrett to Miss Mitford, ed. B. Miller [1954] 220–21). To another friend she wrote, 10 Sept.: “I have had some very pleasant private letters, one from Carlyle” (Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. F. G. Kenyon [1897] 1:194). To Browning, 17 Feb. 1845, she said of TC: “I am a devout sitter at his feet—and it is an effort to me to think him wrong in anything—and once when
he told me to write prose and not verse, I fancied that his opinion was such that I had mistaken my calling,—a fancy which
in infinite kindness and gentleness he stooped immediately to correct. I never shall forget the grace of that kindness” (Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning [1900] 1:25–26). Moncure Conway reported TC as telling him years later that she had sent him the poems in manuscript (which is
evidently wrong) and saying: “I thought that she could do better than write verses: I saw little usefulness in them. She wrote
me then saying, ‘What else can I do? Here I am held hopelessly on a sofa by spinal disease’” (M. Conway, Autobiography [1904] 2:20). Espinasse says that Miss Barrett “wrote him so touching a rejoinder that ‘I had,’ Carlyle confessed, ‘to draw in
my horns’” (Espinasse 214). For further information about the relationship, see Sanders, CBCR.
