ELIZABETH BARRETT (BROWNING).1809-1861.ELIZABETH BARRETT (BROWNING).
ELIZABETH BARRETT (BROWNING).1809-1861.
Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, the daughter of a wealthy West India merchant, was born at Hope End, near Ledbury, in 1809. The delicate, precocious child began rhyming at eight years old, and was encouraged by her proud and indulgent father. In 1826, at seventeen, she published herEssay on Mind, an imitation of Pope. She was an omnivorous reader, and early became a hard student of Greek. When she was twenty-four or five her family removed from Hope End to Sidmouth; thence to London. In 1835 she published a translation from Æschylos,Prometheus Bound, and Other Poems. ThePrometheuswas subsequently re-written.
In 1837, Miss Barrett’s health broke down. She was taken, by the advice of her physician, to Torquay. During her sojourn there her favorite brother was drowned; she had the horror of seeing his boat go down. She was utterly prostrated by this tragedy, and it was not until the following year that she could be removed to London.
A long period of invalidism ensued, during which, however, she continued her studies and literary work. The courage and noble cheerfulness displayed in her letters to Mr. Horne, written at this time, are most remarkable. In 1838 she publishedThe Seraphim, and Other Poems; in 1839,The Romaunt of the Page, a volume of ballads. In 1842 she contributed to the LondonAthenæumsome essays on the Greek-Christianwriters and the English poets. About 1841 she modernized portions of Chaucer’s poetry; Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Monckton Milnes, Horne and others engaging in the same work. Miss Barrett also wrote for Horne’s ‘New Spirit of the Age,’ part of the critique on Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt, and nearly all of the paper on Walter Savage Landor. In 1844, her health having in the meantime gradually improved somewhat, she collected her poems, placing at the head a new composition calledA Drama of Exile, the fruit of her diligent study of the Hebrew Bible.
In 1846, despite the opposition of her father—to whom “a marriage which was to lift his fragile daughter from the couch to which she had been bound as a picture to its frame, must have seemed a rash experiment,”—Elizabeth Barrett was married to Robert Browning. They went at once to Italy, where, the milder climate proving favorable to Mrs. Browning’s health, they continued to reside for fifteen years. They were in the habit of spending their summers in Florence, where their son, Robert Barrett Browning, was born, and their winters in Rome; and occasionally they visited England. Under favorable conditions, Mrs. Browning now produced her greatest works.Casa Guidi Windowswas published in 1851, theSonnets from the Portuguesebeing included in the same volume. In 1856Aurora Leighappeared.
Poems before Congresswere put forth in 1860. Her last poems, written in 1860 and ’61, were collected after her death, which took place at Florence on the 29th of June, 1861.
A strange and beautiful life—with its cloistered maidenhood, its pathetic wavering between Death andLove, to fall at last into Love’s most gracious hands, its sequel of perfect wifehood. “She was like the insect that weaves itself a shroud, yet by some inward force, after a season, is impelled to break through its covering, and come out a winged tiger-moth, emblem of spirituality in its birth, and of passion in the splendor of its tawny dyes.”[4]
Browning’s ‘By the Fireside’ undoubtedly contains a sketch of her own fireside; we recognize at once the tiny figure of the woman
“Reading by firelight—that great browAnd the spirit-small hand propping it.”
No line other than loving has ever been written of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But from all that friends and appreciative critics can say we must ever turn for the last touch to the “One Word More” of him who knew the “silent silver lights and darks undreamed-of” of his own “moon of poets.”
Her education and development described by herself.
As to stories, my story amounts to the Knife-grinder’s, with nothing at all for a catastrophe. A bird in a cage would have as good a story. Most of my events, and nearly all my intense pleasures, have passed in my thoughts. I wrote verses—as I dare say many have done who never wrote any poems—very early; at eight years old and earlier. But, what is less common, the early fancy turned into a will, and remained with me, and from that day to this, poetry has been a distinct object with me—an object to read, think, and live for. And I could make you laugh, although you could notmake the public laugh, by the narrative of nascent odes, epics, and didactics crying aloud on obsolete Muses from childish lips. The Greeks were my demi-gods, and haunted me out of Pope’s Homer until I dreamt more of Agamemnon than of Moses the black pony. And thus my great “epic” of eleven or twelve years old, in four books, and calledThe Battle of Marathon, and of which fifty copies were printed because papa was bent upon spoiling me—is Pope’s Homer done over again, or rather undone; for, although a curious production for a child, it gives evidence only of an imitative faculty and an ear, and a good deal of reading in a peculiar direction. The love of Pope’s Homer threw me into Pope on one side and into Greek on the other, and into Latin as a help to Greek—and the influence of all these tendencies is manifest so long afterwards, as in my ‘Essay on Mind,’ a didactic poem written when I was seventeen or eighteen, and long repented as worthy of all repentance. The poem is imitative in its form, yet is not without traces of an individual thinking and feeling—the bird pecks through the shell in it. With this, it has a pertness and pedantry, which did not even then belong to the character of the author, and which I regret now more than I do the literary defectiveness.
All this time, and indeed the greater part of my life, we lived at Hope End, a few miles from Malvern, in a retirement scarcely broken to me, except by books and my own thoughts; and it is a beautiful country, and was a retirement happy in many ways, although the very peace of it troubles the heart as it looks back. There I had my fits of Pope, and Byron, and Coleridge, and read Greek as hard under the trees as someof your Oxonians in the Bodleian; gathered visions from Plato and the dramatists, and ate and drank Greek, and made my head ache with it. Do you know the Malvern Hills? The hills of Piers Plowman’s Vision? They seem to me my native hills; for, although I was born in the county of Durham, I was an infant when I went first into their neighborhood, and lived there until I had passed twenty by several years. Beautiful, beautiful hills, they are! And yet, not for the whole world’s beauty, would I stand in the sunshine and the shadow of them any more. It would be a mockery, like the taking back of a broken flower to its stalk.
From thence we went to Sidmouth for two years; and there I published my translation of Æschylus, which was written in twelve days, and should have been thrown into the fire afterwards—the only means of giving it a little warmth. The next removal was to London.... And then came the failure in my health, which never had been strong (at fifteen I nearly died), and the publication ofThe Seraphim, the only work I care to acknowledge, and then the enforced exile to Torquay, with prophecy in the fear, and grief, and reluctance of it—a dreadful dream of an exile, which gave a nightmare to my life forever, and robbed it of more than I can speak of here; do not speak of that anywhere.Do not speak of that, dear Mr. Horne; and for the rest, you see that there is nothing to say. It is “a blank, my lord.”
Elizabeth Barrett:Letter to R. H. Horne, 1843. ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, addressed to Richard Hengist Horne.’ New York: James Miller, 1877.
Early friendship with Hugh Stuart Boyd.
Among her friends at this time [1826] and for years afterward—in fact, until his death in 1848—was Hugh Stuart Boyd, favorably known by his translations from the Greek.... They read their favorite authors together, or, rather, the young student read to her old master, for he was blind. A reminiscence of the happy hours they passed together, communing with the mighty minds of old, may be found in Mrs. Browning’s beautiful poem, ‘Wine of Cyprus,’ dedicated to Mr. Boyd, to whom she was indebted for her knowledge of that dainty vintage.
“I think of those long morningsWhich my thought goes far to seek,When, betwixt the folio’s turnings,Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek.Past the pane the mountain spreadingSwept the sheep-bell’s tinkling noise,While a girlish voice was reading,Somewhat low for ai’s and oi’s.”
R. H. Stoddard:Prefatory Memoirto ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning addressed to Richard H. Horne.’
Her learning.
I have her ‘Essay on Mind,’ ... which, and the notes to it, contain allusions to books, as if known by everybody, which Henry Cary declared to me no young man of his day at Oxford had ever looked into.
Mary Russell Mitford:Letter to Rev. Mr. Harness.
Her shyness.
She is a delightful young creature; shy and timid and modest.... She is so sweet and gentle, and so pretty, that one looks at her as if she were some bright flower.
Mary Russell Mitford:Letter to her Father, May, 1836. L’Estrange’s ‘Life of M. R. Mitford.’ London: R. Bentley & Sons, 1870.
Her personal appearance in 1836.
My first acquaintance with Elizabeth Barrett commenced about fifteen years ago.[5]She was certainly one of the most interesting persons that I had ever seen. Everybody who then saw her said the same; so that it is not merely the impression of my partiality or my enthusiasm. Of a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most expressive face, large tender eyes richly fringed by dark eye-lashes, a smile like a sunbeam, and such a look of youthfulness that I had some difficulty in persuading a friend, in whose carriage we went together to Chiswick, that the translatress of the Prometheus of Æschylus, the authoress of the ‘Essay on Mind,’ was old enough to be introduced into company, in technical language wasout. Through the kindness of another invaluable friend, ... I saw much of her during my stay in town. We met so constantly and so familiarly that in spite of the difference of age, intimacy ripened into friendship, and after my return into the country, we corresponded freely and frequently, her letters being just what letters ought to be—her own talk put upon paper.
Her illness.
The tragedy at Torquay.
The next year was a painful one to herself and to all who loved her. She broke a blood-vessel in the lungs, which did not heal.... After attending her for above a twelve-month at her father’s house in Wimpole Street, Dr. Chambers, on the approach of winter, ordered her to a milder climate. Her eldest brother, a brother in heart and in talent worthy of such a sister, together with other devoted relatives, accompanied her to Torquay, and there occurred the fatal event which saddened her bloom of youth, and gave a deeper hue of thought and feeling, especially of devotional feeling, to her poetry.... Nearly a twelve-month had passed and the invalid, still attended by her affectionate companions, had derived much benefit from the mild sea-breezes of Devonshire. One fine summer morning her favorite brother, together with two other fine young men, his friends, embarked on board a small sailing-vessel, for a trip of a few hours. Excellent sailors all, and familiar with the coast, they sent back the boatmen and undertook themselves the management of the little craft. Danger was not dreamt of by any one; after the catastrophe, no one could divine the cause, but in a few minutes after their embarkation, and in sight of their very windows, just as they were crossing the bar, the boat went down, and all who were in her perished. Even the bodies were never found.
This tragedy nearly killed Elizabeth Barrett. She was utterly prostrated by the horror and the grief, and by a natural but a most unjust feeling, that she had been in some sort the cause of this great misery. It was not until the following year that she could beremoved in an invalid carriage, and by journeys of twenty miles a day, to her afflicted family and her London home.
The house that she occupied at Torquay had been chosen as one of the most sheltered in the place. It stood at the bottom of the cliffs, almost close to the sea; and she told me herself that during that whole winter the sound of the waves rang in her ears like the moans of one dying.
Anecdote of her reading.
Still she clung to literature and to Greek; in all probability she would have died without that wholesome diversion to her thoughts. Her medical attendant did not always understand this. To prevent the remonstrances of her friendly physician she caused a small edition of Plato to be so bound as to resemble a novel. He did not know ... that to her such books were not an arduous and painful study, but a consolation and a delight.
Her monotonous life.
Returned to London, she began the life which she continued for so many years, confined to one large and commodious, but darkened, chamber, admitting only her own affectionate family and a few devoted friends (I, myself, have often joyfully travelled five-and-forty miles to see her, and returned the same evening, without entering another house); reading almost every book worth reading in almost every language, and giving herself, heart and soul, to that poetry of which she seemed born to be the priestess.
Mary Russell Mitford: ‘Recollections of a Literary Life.’ New York: Harper & Bros., 1852.
Omnivorous reading.
I read without principle. I have a sort of unity indeed, but it amalgamates instead of selecting—do you understand? When I had read the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis to Malachi, right through, and was never stopped by the Chaldee—and the Greek poets, and Plato, right through from end to end—I passed as thoroughly through the flood of all possible and impossible British and foreign novels and romances, with slices of metaphysics laid thick between the sorrows of the multitudinous Celestinas. It is only useful knowledge and the multiplication table I never tried hard at. And now—what now? Is this matter of exultation? Alas, no! Do I boast of my omnivorousness of reading, even apart from the romances? Certainly, no!—never, except in joke. It’s against my theories and ratiocinations, which take upon themselves to assert that weallgenerally err byreading too much, and out of proportion to what wethink. I should be wiser, I am persuaded, if I had not read half as much—should have had stronger and better exercised faculties, and should stand higher in my own appreciation. The fact is, that thene plus ultraof intellectual indolence is this reading of books. It comes next to what the Americans call “whittling.”
Elizabeth Barrett:Letter to R. H. Horne, 1843. ‘Letters of E. B. Browning to R. H. Horne.’
Her letters.
Her letters ought to be published. In power, versatility, liveliness, and finesse; in perfect originality of glance, and vigor of grasp at every topic of the hour; in their enthusiastic preferences, prejudices, and inconsistencies, I havenever met with any, written by men or by women, more brilliant, spontaneous, and characteristic. This washerform of conversation.
Henry F. Chorley: ‘Autobiography, Memoir, and Letters.’ London: Bentley, 1873.
Her letters make Cowper’s poor. In a hurried note, whose hurry is evident in the handwriting, she drops ... incidental, but brilliant words—just as if the jewels in her rings, jarred by her rapid fingers, had been suddenly unset and fallen out on the paper.
Handwriting.
No other handwriting is like hers; it is strong, legible, singularly un-English (that is, not a slanted or running hand), and more like a man’s than a woman’s.
Theodore Tilton:Memorial Prefaceto ‘Last Poems of Mrs. Browning.’ New York: James Miller, 1862.
Characteristic fragments from her letters.
More of us, you will admit, do harm by groping along the pavement with blind hands for the beggar’s brass coin, than do folly by clutching at the stars from “the misty mountain-top.” And if the would-be star-catchers catch nothing, they keep at least clean fingers.
As topoetry, they are all sitting (in mistake), just now, upon Caucasus for Parnassus—and wondering why they don’t see the Muses!
It comes to this. If poetry, under any form, be exhaustible, Nature is; and if Nature be—we are near a blasphemy—I, for one, could not believe in the immortality of the soul.
Elizabeth Barrett: ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to R. H. Horne.’
Her character sketched by a friend.
I have never seen one more nobly simple, more entirely guiltless of the feminine propensity of talking for effect, more earnest in assertion, more gentle, yet pertinacious in difference, than she was. Like all whose early nurture has chiefly been books, she had a child’s curiosity regarding the life beyond her books, co-existing with opinions accepted as certainties concerning things of which (even with the intuition of genius), she could know little. She was at once forbearing and dogmatic, willing to accept differences, resolute to admit no argument; without any more practical knowledge of social life than a nun might have, when, after long years, she emerged from her cloister and her shroud.
Henry F. Chorley: ‘Autobiography, Memoir, and Letters.’
Her religious faith.
I receive more dogmas, perhaps, than you do. I believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ in the intensest sense—that He was God absolutely. But for the rest, I am very unorthodox about the spirit, the flesh, and the devil, and if you would not let me sit by you, a great many churchmen wouldn’t; in fact, churches, all of them, as at present constituted, seem too narrow and low to hold true Christianity in its proximate developments.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning:Letter to Leigh Hunt. ‘Correspondence of Leigh Hunt,’ edited by his son. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1862.
May I say of myself that I hope there is nobody in the world with a stronger will and aspiration to escape fromsectarianismin any sort or sense, when I haveeyes to discern it—and that the sectarianism of the National Churches, to which I do not belong, and of the dissenting bodies, to which I do, stand together before me on a pretty just level of detestation? Truth (as far as each thinker can apprehend), apprehended—and love, comprehending—make my idea—my hope of a church. But the Christianity of the world is apt to wander from Christ and the hope of Him.
Elizabeth Barrett: ‘Letters to R. H. Horne.’
Her candor.
You are my friend, I hope, but you do not on that account lose the faculty of judging me, or the right of judging me frankly. I do loathe the whole system of personal compliment, as a consequence of a personal interest, and I beseech you not to suffer yourselfeverby any sort of kind impulse from within, or extraneous influence otherwise, to say or modify a word relating to me.... I set more price on your sincerity than on your praise, and consider it more closely connected with the quality called kindness.... Now, mind! your best compliment to me is the truth at all times, without reference to sex or friendship. I excuse the unbonneting.
Elizabeth Barrett: ‘Letters to R. H. Horne.’
Her conscientiousness.
What you say of a “poet’s duty” no one in the world can feel more deeply, in the verity of it, than myself. If I fail ultimately before the public—that is, before the people—for an ephemeral popularity does not appear to me worth trying for—it will not be because I have shrunk from the amount of labor—where labor could do anything. I haveworkedat poetry; it has notbeen with me revery, but art. As the physician and lawyer work at their several professions, so have I, and so do I, apply to mine. And this I say, only to put by any charge of carelessness which may rise up to the verge of your lips or thoughts.
Elizabeth Barrett: ‘Letters to R. H. Horne.’
Her theories regarding imperfect double rhymes.
With reference to the double rhyming, it has appeared to me to be employed with far less variety in ourseriouspoetry than our language would admit of genially, and that the various employment of it would add another string to the lyre of our Terpander. It has appeared to me that the single rhymes, as usually employed, are scarcely as various as they might be, but that of the double rhymes the observation is still truer. A great deal of attention—far more than it would take to rhyme with conventional accuracy—have I given to the subject of rhymes, and have determined in cold blood to hazard some experiments. At the same time I should tell you, that scarcely one of thePanrhymes [occurring in the poem of ‘The Dead Pan’] might not separately be justifiedby the analogy of received rhymes, although they have not themselves been received. Perhaps there is not so irregular a rhyme throughout the poem ofPanas the “fellow” and “prunella” of Pope the infallible. I maintain that my “islands” and “silence” is a regular rhyme in comparison.... A reader of Spanish poetry must be aware how soon the ear may be satisfied even by a recurring vowel. I mean to try it. At any rate, there are so few regular double rhymes in the English language that we must either admit some suchtrial or eschew the double rhymes generally; and I, for one, am very fond of them, and believe them to have a power not yet drawn out to its length, and capable of development, in our lyrical poetry especially.
Elizabeth Barrett: ‘Letters to R. H. Horne.’
Browning’s praise of “The Dead Pan.”
I take the courage and vanity to send to you a note which a poet [Note by R. H. Horne: Robert Browning, then personally unknown to Miss Barrett, although an intimate friend of my own], whom we both admire, wrote to a friend of mine, who lent him the MS. [of ‘The Dead Pan’]. Mark! No opinion was asked about the rhymes,—the satisfaction was altogether impulsive, from within. Send me the note back, and never tell anybody that I showed it to you—it would appear too vain. Also, I have no right to show it. It was sent to me as likely to please me, and pleased me so much and naturally on various accounts, ... that I begged to be allowed to keep it.
Elizabeth Barrett: ‘Letters to R. H. Horne.’
“Lady Geraldine.”
A pleasing myth.
Suddenly, one day, as the product of one day’s work, she astonished her friends with the rhapsody of ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.’... This poem had all the faultiness which one might expect of a hundred and three stanzas forced by green-house heat into full bloom in twelve hours; this too by a weak invalid lying on a sofa; but must we spoil the pretty story that the sweet ballad had all the merit of winning for its writer the hand of Robert Browning!Yet the story is only a fiction of the gossip-writers. Nor is it true that the poet with whom she was to mate was then known to her only by his little book of ‘Bells and Pomegranates.’ She had more than a stranger’s reasons for making the wooer of Lady Geraldine speak in this wise:
“At times a modern volume—Wordsworth’s solemn-thoughted idyl,Howitt’s ballad-verse, or Tennyson’s enchanted reverie,Or from Browning some ‘Pomegranate,’ which if cut deep down the middle,Showed a heart within, blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.”
Theodore Tilton:Memorial Prefaceto ‘Last Poems of Mrs. Browning.’
Surprise of Miss Barrett’s friends at her marriage.
When I was ill at Tynemouth, a correspondence grew up between the then bed-ridden Elizabeth Barrett and myself; and a very intimate correspondence it became. In one of the later letters, in telling me how much better she was, and how grievously disappointed at being prevented going to Italy, she wrote of going out, of basking in the open sunshine, of doing this and that; “in short,” said she, finally, “there is no saying what foolish thing I may do.” The “foolish thing,” evidently in view in this passage, was marrying Robert Browning, and a truly wise act did the “foolish thing” turn out to be.
Harriet Martineau: ‘Autobiography.’ Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1877.
It was more like a fairy tale than anything in real life I have ever known, to read, one morning, in the papers, of her marriage with the author of ‘Paracelsus,’ and to learn, in the course of the day, that not only was she married, but that she was absolutely on her way to Italy. The energy and resolution implied were amazing on the part of one who had long, as her own poems tell us, resigned herself to lie down and die.
Henry F. Chorley: ‘Autobiography, Memoir, and Letters.’
Hawthorne’s first impression of Mrs. Browning, in 1856.
She is a small, delicate woman, with ringlets of dark hair, a pleasant, intelligent, and sensitive face, and a low, agreeable voice. She looks youthful and comely, and is very gentle and lady-like.... She is of that quickly appreciative and responsive order of women, with whom I can talk more freely than with any man; and she has, besides, her own originality, wherewith to help on conversation, though, I should say, not of a loquacious tendency. We ... talked of Miss Bacon; and I developed something of that lady’s theory respecting Shakespeare, greatly to the horror of Mrs. Browning.... On the whole, I like her the better for loving the man Shakespeare with a personal love. We talked, too, of Margaret Fuller, who spent her last night in Italy with the Brownings.... I like her very much.
Nathaniel Hawthorne: ‘Passages from the English Note-Books.’ Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1873.
The Brownings in Italy.
Mrs. Browning is, in many respects, the correlative of her husband. As he is full of manly power, so she is a type of the most sensitive and delicate womanhood. She has been a great sufferer from ill health, and the marks of pain are stamped upon her person and manner. Her figure is slight, her countenance expressive of genius and sensibility, shaded by a veil of long, brown locks; and her tremulous voice often flutters over her words, like the flame of a dying candle over the wick.
I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit. She is a soul of fire, enclosed in a shell of pearl. Her rare and fine genius needs no setting forth at my hands. She is, also, what is not so generally known, a woman of uncommon, nay, profound learning.... Nor is she more remarkable for genius and learning, than for sweetness of temper, tenderness of heart, depth of feeling, and purity of spirit. It is a privilege to know such beings, singly and separately, but to see their powers quickened, and their happiness rounded, by the sacred tie of marriage, is a cause for peculiar and lasting gratitude. A union so complete as theirs, in which the mind has nothing to crave nor the heart to sigh for, is cordial to behold and soothing to remember.
George Stillman Hillard: ‘Six Months in Italy.’ Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1871.
“Mignon.”
She is little, hard-featured, with long, dark ringlets, a pale face, and plaintive voice—something very impressive in her dark eyes and her brow. Her general aspect puts me in mindof Mignon—what Mignon might be in maturity and maternity.
Sara Coleridge:Letterin ‘Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge,’ edited by her daughter. New York: Harper & Bros., 1874.
“The mother of the beautiful child.”
It is a pleasant story, told of the street-beggars who walk through Via Maggio, under the windows of Casa Guidi, that they always spoke of the English woman who lived in that house, not by her well-known English name, nor by any softer Italian word, but simply and touchingly as “The mother of the beautiful child.” This was pleasanter to that woman’s ears than to “hear the nations praising her far off.”
Theodore Tilton:Memorial Prefaceto ‘Last Poems of Mrs. Browning.’
Bayard Taylor’s description.
She was slight and fragile in appearance, with a pale, wasted face, shaded by masses of soft, chestnut curls, which fell on her cheeks, and serious eyes of bluish-gray. Her frame seemed to be altogether disproportionate to her soul. This, at least, was the first impression: her personality, frail as it appeared, soon exercised its power, and it seemed a natural thing that she should have written ‘The Cry of the Children’ or ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship.’ I also understood how these two poets, so different, both intellectually and physically, should have found their complements in each other. The fortunate balance of their reciprocal qualitiesmakes them an exception to the rule that the inter-marriage of authors is unadvisable.
Bayard Taylor: ‘At Home and Abroad.’ (Second Series.) New York: G. P. Putnam, 1862.
Casa Guidi.
Casa Guidi, which has been immortalized by Mrs. Browning’s genius, will be as dear to the Anglo-Saxon traveller as Milton’s Florentine residence has been heretofore.
Those who have known Casa Guidi as it was, can never forget the square ante-room, with its great picture, and pianoforte, at which the boy Browning passed many an hour; the little dining-room, covered with tapestry, and where hung medallions of Tennyson, Carlyle, and Robert Browning; the long room, filled with plaster casts and studies; and dearest of all, the large drawing-room, whereshealways sat. It opens upon a balcony filled with plants, and looks out upon the old iron-gray church of Santa Felice. There was something about this room that seemed to make it a proper and especial haunt for poets. The dark shadows and subdued light gave it a dreamy look, which was enhanced by the tapestry-covered walls and the old pictures of saints, that looked out sadly from their carved frames of black wood. Large book-cases, constructed of specimens of Florentine carving, selected by Mr. Browning, were brimming over with wise-looking books. Tables were covered with more gaily-bound volumes, the gifts of brother authors. Dante’s grave profile, a cast of Keats’s face and brow, taken after death, a pen-and-ink sketch of Tennyson, the genial face of John Kenyon (Mrs. Browning’s good friend and relative), little paintings of the boyBrowning, all attracted the eye in turn, and gave rise to a thousand musings. A quaint mirror, easy-chair, and sofas, and a hundred nothings that always add an indescribable charm, were all massed in this room. But the glory of all, and that which sanctified all, was seated in a low arm-chair, near the door. A small table, strewn with writing-materials, books and newspapers, was always by her side.
—— ——: ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning.’Atlantic Monthly, September, 1861.
An evening with the Brownings, 1858.
We went last evening, at eight o’clock, to see the Brownings; and after some search and enquiry, we found the Casa Guidi, which is a palace in a street not very far from our own. It being dusk, I could not see the exterior.... The street is a narrow one; but on entering the palace we found a spacious staircase and ample accommodations of vestibule and hall, the latter opening on a balcony, where we could hear the chanting of priests in a church close by. Browning told us that this was the first church where an oratorio had ever been performed. He came into the ante-room to greet us, as did his little boy Robert, whom they call Pennini for fondness. The latter cognomen is a diminutive of Apennino, which was bestowed upon him at his first advent into the world because he was so very small, there being a statue in Florence of colossal size called Apennino. I never saw such a boy as this before; so slender, fragile and spirit-like,—not as if he were actually in ill health, but as if he had little or nothing to do with human flesh and blood. His face is very pretty and most intelligent, and exceedingly likehis mother’s.... Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room, and greeted us most kindly,—a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped, and to speak with a shrill, yet sweet tenuity of voice.
She is a good and kind fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although only remotely akin to it. It is wonderful to see how small she is, how pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes. There is not such another figure in the world; and her black ringlets cluster down into her neck, and make her face look the whiter by their sable confusion. I could not form any judgment about her age; it may range anywhere within the limits of human life or elfin life. When I met her in London, at Lord Houghton’s breakfast-table, she did not impress me so singularly; for the morning light is more prosaic than the dim illumination of their great tapestried drawing-room; and besides, sitting next to her, she did not have occasion to raise her voice in speaking, and I was not sensible what a slender voice she has. It is marvellous to me how so extraordinary, so acute, so sensitive a creature can impress us, as she does, with the certainty of her benevolence. It seems to me there were a million chances to one that she would have been a miracle of acidity and bitterness.
We had some tea and some strawberries, and passed a pleasant evening. There was no very noteworthy conversation; the most interesting topic being that disagreeable and now wearisome one of spiritual communications, as regards which Mrs. Browning is a believer, and her husband an infidel.... Browningand his wife had both been present at a spiritual session held by Mr. Hume, and had seen and felt the unearthly hands, one of which had placed a laurel wreath on Mrs. Browning’s head. Browning, however, avowed his belief that these hands were affixed to the feet of Mr. Hume, who lay extended in his chair, with his legs stretched far under the table. The marvellousness of the fact, as I have read of it, and heard it from other eye-witnesses, melted strangely away in his hearty gripe, and at the sharp touch of his logic, while his wife, ever and anon, put in a little gentle word of expostulation.
Nathaniel Hawthorne: ‘Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books.’ Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1872.
The color of her hair.
It curiously happens that I first met Mrs. Browning at Rome in 1859, where and when Hawthorne also first made her acquaintance, I believe. I remember going through the Vatican with him, and the then ex-President Pierce, during my sojourn in Rome, in the spring of that year.
Though we both saw Mrs. Browning last in that year, my impressions are very distinct that her hair was of a dark-chestnut. It did not curl naturally; but, by one of those artifices of the toilet which all of her sex and some of mine understand, it was worn, as it has usually been painted, in side ringlets. Hawthorne’s constitutional propensity to take sombre views of things may account for the liberty he seems to have taken with Mrs. Browning’s hair.
John Bigelow:The Critic, September 23, 1882.
Mrs. Browning’s conversation.
Mrs. Browning’s conversation was most interesting. It was not characterized by sallies of wit or brilliant repartee, nor was it of that nature which is most welcome in society. It was frequently intermingled, with trenchant, quaint remarks, leavened with a quaint, graceful humor of her own; but it was eminently calculated for atête-à-tête. Mrs. Browning never made an insignificant remark. All that she said was always worth hearing; a greater compliment could not be paid her. She was a most conscientious listener, giving you her mind and heart, as well as her magnetic eyes. Though the latter spoke an eager language of their own, she conversed slowly, with a conciseness and point which, added to a matchless earnestness that was the predominant trait of her conversation as it was of her character, made her a most delightful companion.Personswere never her theme, unless public characters were under discussion, or friends who were to be praised, which kind office she frequently took upon herself. One never dreamed of frivolities in Mrs. Browning’s presence, and gossip felt itself out of place.Yourself, notherself, was always a pleasant subject to her, calling out all her best sympathies in joy and yet more in sorrow. Books and humanity, great deeds, and, above all, politics, which include all the grand questions of the day, were foremost in her thoughts, and, therefore, oftenest on her lips. I speak not of religion, for with her everything was religion.
—— ——: ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning,’Atlantic Monthly.
Appearance in her late days.
[Miss Mitford’s] description of twenty-five yearsago[6]is true, every word, of a photograph now lying on our table, copied from Macaire’s original, made at Havre in 1856, and which Robert Browning esteems a faithful likeness of his wife. The three-quarter length shows the comparative stature of the figure, which is here so delicate and diminutive that we can easily imagine how the story come to be told (although not true) that her husband drew this same portrait in ‘The Flight of the Duchess’ when he sketched
——“The smallest lady alive.”
But the one striking feature of the picture is the intellectual and spiritual expression of the face and head; for here, borne up by pillars of curls on either side, is just such an arch as she saw in ‘The Vision of Poets’:
“A forehead royal with the truth.”
A photograph, taken in Rome only a month before she died, wears a not greatly changed expression, except in an added pallor to cheeks always pale; foretokening the near coming of the shadow of death.
Theodore Tilton:Memorial Prefaceto ‘Last Poems of Mrs. Browning.’
“The beauty of expression.”
Hers was not the beauty of feature; it was the loftier beauty of expression. Her slight figure seemed hardly large enough to contain the great heart that beat so fervently within, and the soul that expanded more and more as one year gave place to another. It was difficult tobelieve that such a fairy hand could pen thoughts of such ponderous weight, or that such a still, small voice could utter them with equal force. But it was Mrs. Browning’s face upon which one loved to gaze—that face and head which almost lost themselves in the thick curls of her dark brown hair. That jealous hair could not hide the broad, fair forehead.... Her large brown eyes were beautiful, and were in truth the windows of her soul.
—— ——: ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning.’Atlantic Monthly.