On delightful place names, an old friend sends this note about Newfoundland:

All right, all you word-lovers, I really must share with you the wonderful place names we encountered on our camper trip to Newfoundland. Not that we visited all these towns and headlands and bays and arms of the ocean, mind you, but they are all on the official map, and we managed to see our fair share of them.

Now, I know that a bight is not a bite, but rather a tiny harbor. But I did not know that a tickle is a tricky little channel. And in any case, I was delighted by the whimsical possibilities so many of the names brought to mind. There was no bight at Jerry’s Nose, just a point. Jerry’s Nose was not near Nicky’s Nose Cove or even Blow Me Down. There was a Pitts Sound, not far from Happy Adventure.

I don’t know if Nipper’s Harbour was a bight or not, but Manful Bight surely was. There’s also Lushes Bight, Snakes Bight, and wildest of all, Wild Bight…not far from Dark Tickle. Tickles can lead to any number of things, I suppose; I don’t know exactly where Leading Tickles lead. Perhaps to Spanish Room. Or to Ha-ha Bay. Or maybe to Seldom or to Tilting. Toogood Arm was quite near Virgin Arm, out near the Bay of Exploits.

We did get to Come By Chance, but not to English Harbour, out near the island of Ireland’s Eye. And we were content to pass up Path End and Witless Bay.

I do regret missing a cluster of villages on the east side of Newfoundland, though. They sound lovely, or at least optimistic. They are Heart’s Desire, across the bay from Little Heart’s Ease, not far from Heart’s Content and Heart’s Delight.

Our Newfoundland travel has been a delight. For the next few weeks we’ll be campering through Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. And it’ll tickle me to watch for other interesting bits and bights.

SEJ

Mail Slot, 50 Wimpole Street, and Robert Browning's 1845 Love Letter to Miss Elizabeth Barrett

I was at Wellesley last week for a literature symposium and found myself powerfully drawn to the Special Collections Room of the Margaret Clapp Library. Beside the functioning doorway to this collection of rare books and manuscripts is something perfectly mundane but powerfully compelling -- the front door of 50 Wimpole Street, London W1, behind which lived the family of the curmudgeonly Edward Moulton-Barrett, and most particularly his daughter the poet Elizabeth Barrett. Through 50 Wimpole Street’s brass mail slot passed Robert Browning’s January 1845 fan letter to his “dear Miss Barrett.” Their epistolary romance blossomed through the winter and spring of 1845, progressing to their first face-to-face meeting in May 1845, and culminating in their marriage in September 1846. All of the couple’s storied correspondence and the manuscripts of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, including #28 reside in the Special Collections Room.

It is not the Elizabeth Barrett/Robert Browning letters themselves nor the manuscripts of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning sonnets that draw me to the Special Collections Room. It is the brass mail slot in the Wimpole Street door that I visit whenever I am at the College. If a door symbolizes the separation of the public world from the private domain, then a mail slot symbolizes the semi-permeability of that separation. The fluttering passage of letters (“all dead paper, mute and white! And yet they seem alive and quivering”) between those two realms then symbolizes the possibility that we can transcend our private self-absorption and make genuine connection with others. No wonder that since the installation of the Wimpole Street door at Wellesley in 1937, undergraduates have slipped letters expressing their deepest hopes and longings through its mail slot!