Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
Autograph poetry manuscript signed, a fair copy of ‘A Musical Instrument', [Italy], n.d. [April 1860]
Two pages, 192 x 123mm, on a bifolium, titled in autograph at the head and signed (‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning’) at the end, complete as first published in seven stanzas, 42 lines in total. Brown morocco-backed slipcase, cloth folder. Provenance: Arthur A. Houghton, Jnr (1906-1990); his sale, Christie's, 13 June 1979, lot 74.

The last poem written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the printer’s copy used for publication in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Cornhill Magazine shortly before the poet’s death. Over 15 years after the publication of ‘The Dead Pan’ (1844) – in which EBB announced the advent of a modern, more Christianised poetry – ‘A Musical Instrument’ revivifies the figure of Pan, suggesting that true poetry is, in fact, born of a more pagan force. This fair copy manuscript, with the stanzas numbered by the author, varies from the first published text only in tiny details – it was likely the copy prepared for the printer.

Staying in Rome in April 1860, soon after the furore created in England by ‘A Curse for a Nation’, EBB records sending the present poem to Thackeray in a letter to Isa Blagden: ‘I have just sent the lyric to Thackeray for his magazine. He begged me for something long ago. Robert suggested that now he probably wanted nothing from such profane hands. So I told him that in that case he might send me back my manuscripts. In the more favourable case it may still be too late for this month. The poem is “meek as maid”’. Though lacking the controversial political bias of her recent work – Poems before Congress had provoked an outcry in England because reviewers, incorrectly, assumed the thundering concluding poem, 'A Curse for a Nation', was the poet's curse on her own country – ‘A Musical Instrument’ is far from ‘meek’, described by Alethea Hayter as one ‘of the strongest most direct lyrics Mrs Browning ever wrote’. The poem appeared in the July 1860 edition of the Cornhill Magazine with a full-page illustration by Frederic Leighton, before being published posthumously in the 1862 collection Last Poems, edited by Robert Browning.