The Brownings, Their Life and Art

To this letter Browning added a postscript saying:

Tennyson wrote again to Mrs. Browning, saying, “... How very grateful your little note and Browning’s epilogue made me.” And he signs himself “Ever yours and your husband’s.” There was a brilliant christening luncheon at the home of Monckton Milnes, “and his baby,” notes Mrs. Browning, “was made to sweep, in India muslin and Brussels lace, among a very large circle of admiring guests.” The Brownings were especially invited to bring their little Penini with them, “and he behaved like an angel, everybody said,” continued his mother, “and looked very pretty, I said myself; only he disgraced us all at last by refusing to kiss the baby on the ground of its being ‘troppo grande.’”

To Mrs. Tennyson’s note of invitation to the Brownings to attend the christening of their child, Mrs. Browning replied that they had planned to leave England before that date; “but you offer us an irresistible motive for staying, in spite of fogs and cold,” she continued, “and we would not miss the christening for the world.” At the last, however, Mrs. Browning was unable to go, so that the poet went alone. After the little ceremony Browning took the boy in his arms and tossed him, while Tennyson, looking on, exclaimed: “Ah, that is as good as a glass of champagne for him.”

Florence Nightingale was a not infrequent visitor of the Brownings that summer, and she always followed her calls by a gift of masses of flowers. While “Morte d’Arthur” had been written more than ten years previously, Tennyson was now evolving the entire plan of the “Idylls of the King.” Coventry Patmore, who brought the manuscript copy of his own poems, published later, for Mr. Browning to read, mentioned to the poets that Tennyson was writing a collection of poems on Arthur, which were to be united by their subject, after the manner of “In Memoriam,” which project interested Mrs. Browning greatly. “The work will be full of beauty, I don’t doubt,” she said.

Ruskin invited the Brownings to Denmark Hill to see his Turners, and they found the pictures “divine.” They liked Ruskin very much, finding him “gentle, yet earnest.”

During this London sojourn Mr. Browning’s old friend, William Johnson Fox, who had first encouraged the young poet by praising “not a little, which praise comforted me not a little,” the verses of his “Incondita”; who had written a favorable review of “Pauline”; who had found a publisher for “Paracelsus,” and had introduced the poet to Macready, again appears, and writes to his daughter that he has had “a charming hour” with the Brownings, and that he is more fascinated than ever with Mrs. Browning. “She talked lots of George Sand, and so beautifully, and she silver-electroplated Louis Napoleon!” Mr. Fox adds:[6] “They came in to their lodgings late at night, and R. B. says that in the morning twilight he saw three pictures on the bedroom wall, and speculated as to whom they might be. Light gradually showed the first to be Beatrice Cenci. ‘Good,’ said he; ‘in a poetic region.’ More light; the second, Lord Byron! Who can the third be? And what think you it was? Your (Fox’s) sketch (engraved chalk portrait) of me?’ He made quite a poem and picture of the affair. She seems much better; and the young Florentine was gracious.”

In November the Brownings again left London for Florence, pausing a week in Paris on the way, where they witnessed the picturesque pomp of the reception of Louis Napoleon, the day being brilliant with sunshine, and the hero of the hour producing an impression by riding entirely alone, with at least ten paces between himself and the nearest of his escort, till even Charlotte Cushman, sitting at the side of Mrs. Browning, watching the spectacle, declared this to be “fine.” The “young Florentine” was in a state of ecstasy, which he expressed in mingled French and Italian.

They journeyed to Florence by the Mont Cenis, stopping a week in Genoa, where Mrs. Browning lay ill on her sofa; but the warmth of the Italian sunshine soon restored her, and for two days before they left, she was able to walk all about the beautiful old city. They visited together the Andrea Doria palace, and enjoyed sauntering in a sunshine that was like that of June days dropped into the heart of November. They were delighted to hear the sound of their “dear Italian” again, and proceeded by diligence to Florence, where they took possession of their Casa Guidi home, which looked, wrote Mrs. Browning to her sister-in-law, as if they had only left it yesterday. The little Penini was “in a state of complete agitation” on entering Florence, through having heard so much talk of it, and expressed his emotion by repeated caresses and embraces. Mrs. Browning shared the same amazement at the contrast of climate between Turin and Genoa that twentieth-century travelers experience; Turin having been so cold that they were even obliged to have a fire all night, while at Genoa they were “gasping for breath, with all the windows and doors open, blue skies burning overhead, and no air stirring.” But this very heat was life-giving to Mrs. Browning as they lingered on the terraces, gazing on the beautiful bay encircled by its sweep of old marble palaces. She even climbed half-way up the lighthouse for the view, resting there while Browning climbed to the top, for that incomparable outlook which every visitor endeavors to enjoy. In Florence there were the “divine sunsets” over the Arno, and Penini’s Italian nurse rushing in to greet the child, exclaiming, “Dio mio, come e bellino!” They “caught up their ancient traditions” just where they left them, Mrs. Browning observes, though Mr. Browning, “demoralized by the boulevards,” missed the stir and intensity of Parisian life. They found Powers, the sculptor, changing his location, and Mr. Lytton (the future Earl), who was an attaché at the English Embassy, became a frequent and a welcome visitor. In a letter to Mr. Kenyon Mrs. Browning mentions that Mr. Lytton is interested in manifestations of spiritualism, and had informed her that, to his father’s great satisfaction (his father being Sir E. Bulwer Lytton), these manifestations had occurred at Knebworth, the Lytton home in England. Tennyson’s brother, who had married an Italian lady, was in Florence, and the American Minister, Mr. Marsh. With young Lytton at this time, Poetry was an article of faith, and nothing would have seemed to him more improbable, even had any of his clairvoyants foretold it, than his future splendid career as Viceroy of India.

The Ponte Vecchio and the Arno, Florence.

Mrs. Browning was reading Prudhon that winter, and also Swedenborg, Lamartine, and other of the French writers. Browning was writing from time to time many of the lyrics that appear in the Collection entitled “Men and Women,” while on Mrs. Browning had already dawned the plan of “Aurora Leigh.” They read the novel of Dumas, Diane de Lys, Browning’s verdict on it being that it was clever, but outrageous as to the morals; and Mrs. Browning rejoiced greatly in Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” saying of Mrs. Stowe, “No woman ever had such a success, such a fame.” All in all, this winter of 1852-1853 was a very happy one to the poets, what with their work, their friends, playing with the little Wiedemann (Penini), the names seeming interchangeably used, and their reading, which included everything from poetry and romance to German mysticism, social economics, and French criticism. Mrs. Browning found one of the best apologies for Louis Napoleon in Lamartine’s work on the Revolution of ’48; and she read, with equal interest, that of Louis Blanc on the same period. In April “Colombe’s Birthday” was produced at the Haymarket Theater in London, the role of the heroine being taken by Miss Helen Faucit, afterward Lady Martin. The author had no financial interest in this production, which ran for two weeks, and was spoken of by London critics as holding the house in fascinated attention, with other appreciative phrases.

Mrs. Browning watches the drama of Italian politics, and while she regarded Mazzini as noble, she also felt him to be unwise, a verdict that time has since justified. “We see a great deal of Frederick Tennyson,” she writes; “Robert is very fond of him, and so am I. He too writes poems, and prints them, though not for the public.” Their mutual love of music was a strong bond between Browning and Mr. Tennyson, who had a villa on the Fiesolean slope, with a large hall in which he was reported to “sit in the midst of his forty fiddlers.”

For the coming summer they had planned a retreat into Giotto’s country, the Casentino, but they finally decided on Bagni di Lucca again, where they remained from July till October, Mr. Browning writing “In a Balcony” during this villeggiatura. Before leaving Florence they enjoyed an idyllic day at Pratolina with Mrs. Kinney, the wife of the American Minister to the Court of Turin, and the mother of Edmund Clarence Stedman. The royal residences of the old Dukes of Tuscany were numerous, but among them all, that at Pratolina, so associated with Francesco Primo and Bianca Capella, is perhaps the most interesting, and here Mrs. Kinney drove her guests, where they picnicked on a hillside which their hostess called the Mount of Vision because Mrs. Browning stood on it; Mr. Browning spoke of the genius of his wife, “losing himself in her glory,” said Mrs. Kinney afterward, while Mrs. Browning lay on the grass and slept. The American Minister and Mrs. Kinney were favorite guests in Casa Guidi, where they passed with the Brownings the last evening before the poets set out for their summer retreat. Mrs. Browning delighted in Mr. Kinney’s views of Italy, and his belief in its progress and its comprehension of liberty. The youthful Florentine, Penini, was delighted at the thought of the change, and his devotion to his mother was instanced one night when Browning playfully refused to give his wife a letter, and Pen, taking the byplay seriously, fairly smothered her in his clinging embrace, exclaiming, “Never mind, mine darling Ba!” He had caught up his mother’s pet name, “Ba,” and often used it. It was this name to which she refers in the poem beginning,

“I have a name, a little name,
Uncadenced for the ear.”

Beside the Pratolina excursion, Mr. Lytton gave a little reception for them before the Florentine circle dissolved for the summer, asking a few friends to meet the Brownings at his villa on Bellosguardo, where they all sat out on the terrace, and Mrs. Browning made the tea, and they feasted on nectar and ambrosia in the guise of cream and strawberries.

“Such a view!” said Mrs. Browning of that evening. “Florence dissolving in the purple of the hills, and the stars looking on.” Mrs. Browning’s love for Florence grew stronger with every year. That it was her son’s native city was to her a deeply significant fact, for playfully as they called him the “young Florentine,” there was behind the light jest a profound recognition of the child’s claim to his native country. Still, with all this response to the enchantment of Florence, they were planning to live in Paris, after another winter (which they wished to pass in Rome), as the elder Browning and his daughter Sarianna were now to live in the French capital, and Robert Browning was enamored of the brilliant, abounding life, and the art, and splendor of privilege, and opportunity in Paris. “I think it too probable that I may not be able to bear two successive winters in the North,” said Mrs. Browning, “but in that case it will be easy to take a flight for a few winter months into Italy, and we shall regard Paris, where Robert’s father and sister are waiting for us, as our fixed place of residence.” This plan, however, was never carried out, as Italy came to lay over them a still deeper spell, which it was impossible to break. Mr. Lytton, with whom Mrs. Browning talked of all these plans and dreams that evening on his terrace, had just privately printed his drama, “Clytemnestra,” which Mrs. Browning found “full of promise,” although “too ambitious” because after Æschylus. But this young poet, afterward to be so widely known in the realm of poetry as “Owen Meredith,” and as Lord Lytton in the realm of diplomacy and statesmanship, impressed her at the time as possessing an incontestable “faculty” in poetry, that made her expect a great deal from him in the future. She invited him to visit them in their sylvan retreat that summer at Bagni di Lucca, an invitation that he joyously accepted. Some great savant, who was “strong in veritable Chinese,” found his way to Casa Guidi, as most of the wandering minstrels of the time did, and “nearly assassinated” the mistress of the ménage with an interminable analysis of a Japanese novel. Mr. Lytton, who was present, declared she grew paler and paler every moment, which she afterward asserted was not because of sympathy with the heroine of this complex tale! But this formidable scholar had a passport to Mrs. Browning’s consideration by bringing her a little black profile of her beloved Isa, which gave “the air of her head,” and then, said Mrs. Browning, laughingly, “how could I complain of a man who rather flattered me than otherwise, and compared me to Isaiah?”

But at last, after the middle of July, what with poets, and sunsets from terraces, and savants, and stars, they really left their Florence “dissolving in her purple hills” behind them, and bestowed themselves in Casa Tolomei, at the Baths, where a row of plane trees stood before the door, in which the cicale sang all day, and solemn, mysterious mountains kept watch all day and night. There was a garden, lighted by the fireflies at night, and Penini mistook the place for Eden. His happiness overflowed in his prayers, and he thriftily united the petition that God would “mate him dood” with the supplication that God would also “tate him on a dontey,” thus uniting all possible spiritual and temporal aspirations. The little fellow was wild with happiness in this enchanted glade, where the poets were “safe among mountains, shut in with a row of seven plane-trees joined at top.” Mr. Browning was still working on his lyrics, of which his wife had seen very few. “We neither of us show our work to the other till it is finished,” she said. She recognized that an artist must work in solitude until the actual result is achieved.

Casa Guidi

It seems that Mr. Chorley in London had fallen into depressed spirits that summer, indulging in the melancholy meditations that none of his friends loved him, beyond seeing in him a “creature to be eaten,” and that, having furnished them with a banquet, their attentions to him were over (a most regrettable state of mind, one may observe, en passant, and one of those spiritual pitfalls which not only Mr. Chorley in particular, but all of us in general would do particularly well to avoid). The letter that Mrs. Browning wrote to him wonderfully reveals her all-comprehending sympathy and her spiritual buoyancy and intellectual poise. “You are very wrong,” she says to him, “and I am very right to upbraid you. I take the pen from Robert—he would take it if I did not. We scramble a little for the pen which is to tell you this, and be dull in the reiteration, rather than not to instruct you properly.... I quite understand how a whole life may seem rumpled and creased—torn for the moment; only you will live it smooth again, dear Mr. Chorley, take courage. You have time and strength and good aims; and human beings have been happy with much less.... I think we belied ourselves to you in England. If you knew how, at that time, Robert was vexed and worn! why, he was not the same, even to me!... But then and now believe that he loved and loves you. Set him down as a friend, as somebody to rest on, after all; and don’t fancy that because we are away here in the wilderness (which blossoms as the rose, to one of us, at least) we may not be full of affectionate thoughts and feelings toward you in your different sort of life in London.” The lovely spirit goes on to remind Mr. Chorley that they have a spare bedroom “which opens of itself at the thought of you,” and that if he can trust himself so far from home, she begs him to try it for their sakes. “Come and look in our faces, and learn us more by heart, and see whether we are not two friends?”

Surely, that life was rich, whatever else it might be denied, that had Elizabeth Browning for a friend. Her genius for friendship was not less marvelous, nor less to be considered, than her genius as a poet. Indeed, truly speaking, the one, in its ideal fullness and completeness, comprehends the other.

The summer days among the beautiful hills, and by the green, rushing river, were made aboundingly happy to the Brownings by the presence of their friends, the Storys, who shared these vast solitudes. The Storys had a villa perched on the top of the hill, just above the Brownings’, the terrace shaded with vines, and the great mountains towering all around them, while a swift mountain brook swept by under an arched bridge, its force turning picturesque mills far down the valley. Under the shadow of the chestnut trees fringing its banks, Shelley had once pushed his boat. “Of society,” wrote Story to Lowell, “there is none we care to meet but the Brownings, and with them we have constant and delightful intercourse, interchanging long evenings, two or three times a week, and driving and walking whenever we meet. They are so simple, unaffected, and sympathetic. Both are busily engaged in writing, he on a volume of lyrics, and she on a tale or novel in verse.”

This “tale” must have been “Aurora Leigh.” The wives of the poet and the sculptor held hilarious intercourse while going back and forth between each other’s houses on donkey-back, with an enjoyment hardly eclipsed by that of Penini himself, whose prayer that God would let him ride on “dontey-back” was so aboundingly granted that the child might well believe in the lavishness of divine mercies. Browning and Story walked beside and obediently held the reins of their wives’ steeds, that no mishap might occur. How the picture of these Arcadian days, in those vast leafy solitudes, peopled only by gods and muses, the attendant “elementals” of these choice spirits, flashes out through more than the half century that has passed since those days of their joyous intercourse. There was a night when Story went alone to take tea with the Brownings, staying till nearly midnight, and Browning accompanied him home in the mystic moonlight. Mrs. Browning, who apparently shared her little son’s predilections for the donkey as a means of transportation, would go for a morning ride, Browning walking beside her as slowly as possible, to keep pace with the donkey’s degree of speed.

Into this Arcady came, by some untraced dispensation of the gods, a French master of recitations, who had taught Rachel, and had otherwise allied himself with the great. M. Alexandre brought his welcome with him, in his delightful recitations from the poets. Mr. Lytton, having accepted Mrs. Browning’s invitation given to him on his Bellosguardo terrace, now appeared; and the Storys and the Brownings organized a festa, in true Italian spirit, in an excursion they should all make to Prato Fiortito.

Prato Fiortito is six miles from Bagni di Lucca, perpendicularly up and down, “but such a vision of divine scenery,” said Mrs. Browning. High among the mountains, Bagni di Lucca is yet surrounded by higher peaks of the Apennines. The journey to Prato Fiortito is like going up and down a wall, the only path for the donkeys being in the beds of the torrents that cut their way down in the spring.

Here, after “glorious climbing,” in which Mrs. Browning distinguished herself no less than the others, they arrived at the little old church, set amid majestic limestone mountains and embowered in purple shade. Here they feasted, Penini overcome with delight, and on shawls spread under the great chestnut trees Mrs. Browning and Mrs. Story were made luxuriously comfortable, while they all talked and read, M. Alexandre reciting from the French dramatists, and Lytton reading from his “Clytemnestra.” The luncheon was adorned by a mass of wild strawberries, picked on the spot, by Browning, Story, Lytton, and Alexandre, while the ladies co-operated in the industry at this honestly earned feast by assisting to hull the berries. The bottle of cream and package of sugar tucked away in the picnic basket added all that heart could desire to this ambrosial luncheon. Mrs. Story, whom Mrs. Browning described as “a sympathetic, graceful woman, fresh and innocent in face and thought,” was a most agreeable companion; and she and Mrs. Browning frequently exchanged feminine gossip over basins of strawberries and milk in each other’s houses, for strawberries abounded in these hills. “If a tree is felled in the forests,” said Mrs. Browning, “strawberries spring up just as mushrooms might, and the peasants sell them for just nothing.”

One night when the Brownings were having tea with the Storys, the talk turned on Hawthorne. Story, of course, knew the great romancer, whom the Brownings had not then met and about whom they were curious. “Hawthorne is a man who talks with a pen,” said Story; “he does not open socially to his intimate friends any more than he does to strangers. It isn’t his way to converse.” Mrs. Browning had then just been reading the “Blithedale Romance,” in which she had sought unavailingly, it seems, for some more personal clue to the inner life of its author.

On a brilliant August day the Brownings and the Storys fared forth on a grand excursion on donkey-back, to Benabbia, a hilltown, perched on one of the peaks. Above it on the rocks is a colossal cross, traced by some thunder-bolt of the gods, cut in the solid stone. From this excursion they all returned after dark, in terror of their lives lest the donkeys slip down the sheer precipices; but the scenery was “exquisite, past all beauty.” Mrs. Browning was spell-bound with its marvelous sublimity, as they looked around “on the world of innumerable mountains bound faintly with the gray sea, and not a human habitation.”

Mrs. Browning was then reading the poems of Coventry Patmore, just published, of which Browning had read the manuscript in London in the previous year. The poems of Alexander Smith had also appeared at this time, and in him Mrs. Browning found “an opulence of imagery,” but a defect as to the intellectual part of poetry. With her characteristic tolerance, she instanced his youth in plea of this defect, and said that his images were “flowers thrown to him by the gods, gods beautiful and fragrant, but having no root either in Etna or Olympus.” Enamored, as ever, of novels, she was also reading “Vilette,” which she thought a strong story, though lacking charm, and Mrs. Gaskell’s “Ruth,” which pleased her greatly.

With no dread of death, Mrs. Browning had a horror of the “rust of age,” the touch of age “which is the thickening of the mortal mask between souls. Why talk of age,” she would say, “when we are all young in soul and heart?... Be sure that it’s highly moral to be young as long as possible. Women who dress ‘suitably to their years’ (that is, as hideously as possible) are a disgrace to their sex, aren’t they now?” she would laughingly declare.

This summer in the Apennines at Bagni di Lucca had been a fruitful one to Browning in his poetic work. It became one of constant development, and, as Edmund Gosse points out, “of clarification and increasing selection.” He had already written many of his finest lyrics, “Any Wife to Any Husband,” “The Guardian Angel,” and “Saul”; and in these and succeeding months he produced that miracle of beauty, the poem called “The Flight of the Duchess”; and “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” “The Statue and the Bust,” “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” and “Andrea del Sarto.” To Milsand, Browning wrote that he was at work on lyrics “with more music and painting than before.”

The idyllic summer among the grand chestnut trees came to an end, as summers always do, and October found the Brownings again in Casa Guidi, though preparing to pass the winter in Rome. Verdi had just completed his opera of “Trovatore,” which was performed at the Pergola in Florence, and the poets found it “very passionate and dramatic.”

In November they fared forth for Rome, “an exquisite journey of eight days,” chronicled Mrs. Browning, “seeing the great monastery and triple church of Assisi, and that wonderful passion of waters at Terni.”

It was the picturesque Rome of the popes that still remained in that winter, and the Eternal City was aglow with splendid festivals and processions and with artistic interest. The Brownings caught something of its spirit, even as they came within view of the colossal dome of St. Peter’s, and they entered the city in the highest spirits, “Robert and Penini singing,” related Mrs. Browning, “actually, for the child was radiant and flushed with the continual change of air and scene.” The Storys had engaged an apartment for them, and they found “lighted fires and lamps,” and all comfort.

The Clasped Hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Cast in bronze from the model taken by Harriet Hosmer in Rome, 1853.
The original is in the possession of the author.

That winter of 1853-1854 still stands out in the Roman panorama as one of exceptional brilliancy. There was a galaxy of artists,—Story, who had already won fame on two continents; William Page, who believed he had discovered the secret of Titian’s coloring; Crawford, and “young Leighton,” as Mrs. Browning called the future president of the Royal Academy; Gibson, and his brilliant pupil, Harriet Hosmer; Fisher, who painted a portrait of Browning, and also of Penini, for his own use to exhibit in London. It was during this winter that Miss Hosmer took the cast of the “Clasped Hands” of the Brownings, which was put into bronze, and which must always remain a work of the most tender interest. Mrs. Browning was very fond of “Hatty,” as she called her, and in a letter to her Isa she described a pretty scene when Lady Marian Alford, the daughter of the Duke of Northampton, knelt before the girl sculptor and placed on her finger a ring of diamonds surrounding a ruby. Browning’s early friend, M. de Ripert-Monclar, to whom he had dedicated his “Paracelsus,” and Lockhart, were also in Rome; and Leighton was completing his great canvas of Cimabue’s Madonna carried in procession through the streets of Florence.

The Brownings were domiciled in the Bocca di Leone, while the Storys were in the Piazza di Spagna; Thackeray and his two daughters were close at hand, in and out at the Brownings’, with his “talk of glittering dust swept out of salons.” There were Hans Christian Andersen, and Fanny Kemble, with her sister, Mrs. Sartoris, and Lady Oswald, a sister of Lord Elgin. Thackeray’s daughter, Miss Anne Thackeray (now Lady Ritchie), still finds vivid her girlish memory of Mrs. Browning,—“a slight figure in a thin black gown and the unpretentious implements of her magic,” by her sofa, on a little table. Lady Ritchie turns back to her diary of that winter to find in it another of her early impressions of Mrs. Browning, “in soft, falling flounces of black silk, with her heavy curls drooping, and a thin gold chain around her neck.” This chain held a tiny locket of crystal set in coils of gold, which she had worn from childhood, not at all as an ornament, but as a little souvenir. On her death Mr. Browning put into it some of her hair, and gave the treasured relic to Kate Field, from whom it came later into the possession of the writer of this book. Lady Ritchie recalls one memorable evening that season in the salon of Mrs. Sartoris, when the guests assembled in the lofty Roman drawing-room, full of “flowers and light, of comfort and color.” She recalls how the swinging lamps were lighted, shedding a soft glow; how the grand piano stood open, and there was music, and “tables piled with books,” and flowers everywhere. The hostess was in a pearl satin gown with flowing train, and sat by a round table reading aloud from poems of Mr. Browning, when the poet himself was announced, “and as she read, in her wonderful muse-like way, he walked in.” All the lively company were half laughing and half protesting, and Mrs. Kemble, with her regal air, called him to her side, to submit to him some disputed point, which he evaded. Mrs. Sartoris had a story, with which she amused her guests, of a luncheon with the Brownings, somewhere in Italy, where, when she rose to go, and remarked how delightful it had been, and the other guests joined in their expressions of enjoyment, Mr. Browning impulsively exclaimed: “Come back and sup with us, do!” And Mrs. Browning, with the dismay of the housewife, cried: “Oh, Robert, there is no supper, nothing but the remains of the pie.” To which the poet rejoined: “Then come back and finish the pie.”

Mrs. Browning was deeply attached to Fanny Kemble. She describes her, at this time, as “looking magnificent, with her black hair and radiant smile. A very noble creature, indeed,” added Mrs. Browning; “somewhat unelastic, attached to the old modes of thought and convention, but noble in qualities and defects.... Mrs. Sartoris is genial and generous ... and her house has the best society in Rome, and exquisite music, of course.”

Mrs. Browning often joined her husband in excursions to galleries, villas, and ruins; and when in the Sistine Chapel, on a memorable festival, they heard “the wrong Miserere,” she yet found it “very fine, right or wrong, and overcoming in its pathos.” M. Goltz, the Austrian Minister, was an acquaintance whom the Brownings found “witty and agreeable,” and Mrs. Browning called the city “a palimpsest Rome,” with its records written all over the antique.

The sorrow of the Storys over the death of a little son shadowed Mrs. Browning, and she feared for her own Penini, but as the winter went on she joyfully wrote of him that he “had not dropped a single rose-leaf from his cheeks,” and with her sweet tenderness of motherly love she adds that he is “a poetical child, really, and in the best sense. He is full of sweetness and vivacity together, of imagination and grace,” and she pictures his “blue, far-reaching eyes, and the innocent face framed in golden ringlets.” Mrs. Kemble came to them two or three times a week, and they had long talks, “we three together,” records Mrs. Browning. Mr. Page occupied the apartment just over that of the Brownings, and they saw much of him. “His portrait of Miss Cushman is a miracle,” exclaimed Mrs. Browning. Page begged to paint a portrait of the poet, of which Mrs. Browning said that he “painted a picture of Robert like an Italian, and then presented it to me like a prince.” The coloring was Venetian, and the picture was at first considered remarkable, but its color has entirely vanished now, so that it seems its painter was not successful in surprising the secret of Titian. In the spring of 1910 Mr. Barrett Browning showed this picture to some friends in his villa near Florence, and its thick, opaque surface hardly retained even a suggestion of color.

Not the least of Mrs. Browning’s enjoyment of that winter was the pleasure that Rome gave to her little son. “Penini is overwhelmed with attentions and gifts of all kinds,” she wrote, and she described a children’s party given for him by Mrs. Page, who decorated the table with a huge cake, bearing “Penini” in sugar letters, where he sat at the head and did the honors. Browning all this time was writing, although the social allurements made sad havoc on his time. They wandered under the great ilex trees of the Pincio, and gazed at the Monte Mario pine. Then, as now, every one drove in that circular route on the Pincian hill, where carriages meet each other in passing every five minutes. With the Storys and other friends they often went for long drives and frequent picnics on the wonderful Campagna, that vast green sea that surrounds Rome, the Campagna Mystica. On one day Mr. Browning met “Hatty” Hosmer on the Spanish Steps, and said to her: “Next Saturday Ba and I are going to Albano on a picnic till Monday, and you and Leighton are to go with us.” “Why this extravagance?” laughingly questioned Miss Hosmer. “On account of a cheque, a buona grazia, that Ticknor and Fields of Boston have sent—one they were not in the least obliged to send,” replied the poet.

In those days there was no international copyright, but Mr. Browning’s Boston publishers needed no legal constraint to act with ideal honor. So on the appointed morning, a partie carré of artists—two poets, one sculptor, one painter—drove gayly through the Porta San Giovanni, on that road to Albano, with its wonderful views of the Claudian aqueducts in the distance, through whose arches the blue sky is bluer, and beyond which are the violet-hued Alban hills. Then, as now, the road led by the Casa dei Spirite, with its haunting associations, and its strange mural decorations of specters and wraiths. Past that overhanging cliff, with its tragic legend, they drove, encountering the long procession of wine carts, with their tinkling bells, and the dogs guarding the sleeping padrones. Passing the night in Albano, the next day they mounted donkeys for their excursion into the Alban hills, past lonely monasteries, up the heights of Rocca di Papa, where the traveler comes on the ancient camping-ground of Hannibal, and where they see the padres and acolytes sunning themselves on the slopes of Monte Cavo; on again, to the rocky terraces from which one looks down on Alba Longa and the depths of Lago di Nemi, beneath whose waters is still supposed to be the barque of Caligula, and across the expanse of the green Campagna to where Æneas landed.

The Campagna and Ruins of the Claudian Aqueducts, Rome.

Miss Hosmer is the authority on this poetic pilgrimage, and she related that they all talked of art, of the difficulties of art,—those encountered by the poet, the sculptor, and the painter,—each regarding his own medium of expression as the most difficult. Mrs. Browning’s “Hatty” had bestowed in her bag a volume of Mr. Browning’s, and on the homeward journey from Albano to Rome he read aloud to them his “Saul.” At the half-way house on the Campagna, the Torre di Mezza, they paused, to gaze at the “weird watcher of the Roman Campagna,” the monument to Apuleia, whose ruins are said to have assumed her features.

Nothing in all the classic atmosphere of Rome, filled with the most impressive associations of its mighty past, appealed more strongly to the Brownings than the glorious Campagna, with its apparently infinite open space, brilliant with myriads of flowers, and the vast billowing slopes that break like green waves against the purple hills, in their changeful panorama of clouds and mists and snow-crowned heights dazzling under a glowing sun.

Fascinating as this winter in Rome had been to them, rich in friendships and in art, the Brownings were yet glad to return to their Florence with the May days, to give diligence and devotion to their poetic work, which nowhere proceeded so felicitously as in Casa Guidi.

Browning was now definitely engaged on the poems that were to make up the “Men and Women.” Mrs. Browning was equally absorbed in “Aurora Leigh.” Each morning after their Arcadian repast of coffee and fruit, he went to his study, and she to the salotto, whose windows opened on the terrace looking out on old gray San Felice where she always wrote, to devote themselves to serious work. “Aurora Leigh” proceeded rapidly some mornings, and again its progress would remind her of the web of Penelope. During this summer Browning completed “In a Balcony,” and wrote the “Holy Cross Day,” the “Epistle of Karnish,” and “Ben Karshook’s Wisdom.” Like his wife, Browning held poetry to be above all other earthly interests; he was a poet by nature and by grace, and his vast range of scholarship, his “British-Museum-Library memory,” and his artistic feeling and taste, all conserved to this one end. But poetry to him was not outside, but inclusive of the very fullest human life. Mrs. Browning’s lines,

“... No perfect artist is developed here
From any imperfect woman,...”

embodied his convictions as well, for man and woman alike. He had that royal gift of life in its fullness, an almost boundless capacity of enjoyment, and to him life meant the completest development and exercise of all its powers.

The Brownings found their Florentine circle all in evidence. Mr. Lytton, a favorite and familiar visitor at Casa Guidi; Frederick Tennyson (and perhaps his “forty fiddlers” as well), and the Trollopes, Isa Blagden, and various wandering minstrels. They passed evenings with Mr. Lytton in his villa, and would walk home “to the song of nightingales by starlight and firefly light.” To Mrs. Browning Florence looked more beautiful than ever after Rome. “I love the very stones of it,” she said. Limitations of finance kept them in Florence all that summer. “A ship was to have brought us in something, and brought us in nothing,” she explained to a friend in England, “and the nothing had a discount, beside.” But she took comfort in the fact that Penini was quite as well and almost as rosy as ever, despite the intense heat; and the starlight and the song of the nightingales were not without consolation. A letter from Milsand (“one of the noblest and most intellectual men,” says Mrs. Browning of him) came, and they were interested in his arraignment of the paralysis of imagination in literature. In September she hears from Miss Mitford of her failing health, and tenderly writes: “May the divine love in the face of our Lord Jesus Christ shine upon you day and night, with His ineffable tenderness.” Mrs. Browning’s religious feeling was always of that perfect reliance on the Divine Love that is the practical support of life. “For my own part,” she continues, “I have been long convinced that what we call death is a mere incident in life.... I believe that the body of flesh is a mere husk that drops off at death, while the spiritual body emerges in glorious resurrection at once. Swedenborg says some people do not immediately realize that they have passed death, which seems to me highly probable. It is curious that Frederick Denison Maurice takes this precise view of the resurrection, with apparent unconsciousness of what Swedenborg has stated, and that I, too, long before I had ever read Swedenborg, or had even heard the name of Maurice, came to the same conclusion.... I believe in an active, human life, beyond death, as before it, an uninterrupted life.” Mrs. Browning would have found herself in harmony with that spiritual genius, Dr. William James, who said: “And if our needs outrun the visible universe, why may not that be a sign that the invisible universe is there? Often our faith in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.” Faith is the divine vision, and no one ever more absolutely realized this truth than Elizabeth Browning.

“Ah, blessed vision! blood of God!
My spirit beats her mortal bars,
As down dark tides the glory slides,
And star-like mingles with the stars.”

At another time Mrs. Browning remarked that she should fear for a revealed religion incapable of expansion, according to the needs of man; while Dr. James has said, “Believe what is in the line of your needs.” Many similarities of expression reveal to how wonderful a degree Mrs. Browning had intuitively grasped phases of truth that became the recognized philosophy of a succeeding generation, and which were stamped by the brilliant and profound genius of William James, the greatest psychologist of the nineteenth century. “What comes from God has life in it,” said Mrs. Browning, “and certainly from the growth of all living things, spiritual growth cannot be excepted.”

The summer passed “among our own nightingales and fireflies,” playfully said Mrs. Browning, and in the autumn Mrs. Sartoris stopped to see them, on her way to Rome, “singing passionately and talking eloquently.”

Notwithstanding some illness, Mrs. Browning completed four thousand lines of “Aurora Leigh” before the new year of 1855, in which were expressed all her largest philosophic thought, and her deepest insight into the problems of life. Fogazzaro, whose recent death has deprived Italy of her greatest literary inspirer since Carducci, said of “Aurora Leigh” that he wished the youth of Italy might study this great poem,—“those who desire poetic fame that they might gain a high conception of poetry; the weak, in that they might find stimulus for strength; the sad and discouraged, in that they might find comfort and encouragement.” It was this eminent Italian novelist and Senator (the King of Italy naming a man as Senator, not in the least because of any political reasons, but to confer on him the honor of recognition of his genius in Literature, Science, or Art, and a very inconvenient, however highly prized, honor he often finds it),—Senator Antonio Fogazzaro, who contributed, to an Italian biography[7] of the Brownings by Fanny Zampini, Contessa Salazar, an “Introduction” which is a notable piece of critical appreciation of the wedded poets from the Italian standpoint. The Senator records himself as believing that few poets can be read “with so much intellectual pleasure and spiritual good; for if the works of Robert and Elizabeth Browning surprise us by the vigorous originality of their thought,” he continues, “they also show us a rare and salutary spectacle,—two souls as great in their moral character as in their poetic imagination. ‘Aurora Leigh’ I esteem Mrs. Browning’s masterpiece.... The ideal poet is a prophet, inspired by God to proclaim eternal truth....”

The student of Italian literature will find a number of critical appreciations of the Brownings, written within the past forty or fifty years, some of which offer no little interest. “Every man has two countries, his own and Italy,” and the land they had made their own in love and devotion returned this devotion in measure overflowing.

Robert and Elizabeth Browning would have been great,—even immortally great, as man and woman, if they had not been great poets. They both lived, in a simple, natural way, the essential life of the spirit, the life of scholarship and noble culture, of the profound significance of thought, of creative energy, of wide interest in all the important movements of the day, and of beautiful and sincere friendships.

“O life, O poetry,
Which means life in life,”

wrote Mrs. Browning.

The character of Mrs. Browning has been so often portrayed as that of some abnormal being, half-nervous invalid, half-angel, as if she were a special creation of nature with no particular relation to the great active world of men and women, that it is quite time to do away with the category of nonsense and literary hallucination. One does not become less than woman by being more. Mrs. Browning fulfilled every sweetest relation in life as daughter, sister, friend, wife, and mother; and her life was not the less normal in that it was one of exceptional power and exaltation. She saw in Art the most potent factor for high service, and she held that it existed for Love’s sake, for the sake of human co-operation with the purposes of God.

CHAPTER VIII

The winter of 1855 was bitterly cold, and by January the Brownings fairly barricaded themselves in two rooms which could best be heated, and in these fires were kept up by day as well as night. In April, however, the divine days came again, and the green hillslope from the Palazzo Pitti to the Boboli Gardens was gay with flowers. Mr. Browning gave four hours every day to dictating his poems to a friend who was transcribing them for him. Mrs. Browning had completed some seven thousand lines of “Aurora Leigh,” but not one of these had yet been copied for publication. Various hindrances beset them, but finally in June they left for England, their most important impedimenta being sixteen thousand lines of poetry, almost equally divided between them, comprising his manuscript for “Men and Women,” and hers for “Aurora Leigh,” complete, save for the last three books. The change was by no means unalloyed joy. To give up, even temporarily, their “dream-life of Florence,” leaving the old tapestries and pre-Giotto pictures, for London lodgings, was not exhilarating; but after a week in Paris they found themselves in an apartment in No. 13 Dorset Street, Manchester Square, where they remained until October, every hour filled with engagements or work. Proof-sheets were coming in at all hours; likewise friends, with the usual contingent of the “devastators of a day,” and all that fatigue and interruption and turmoil that lies in wait for the pilgrim returning to his former home, beset and entangled them. Mrs. Browning’s youngest brother, Alfred Barrett, was married that summer to his cousin Lizzie, the “pretty cousin” to whom allusion has already been made as the original of Mrs. Browning’s poem, “A Portrait.” They were married in Paris at the English Embassy, and passed the summer on the Continent. Mrs. Browning’s sister Henrietta (Mrs. Surtees Cook) was unable to come up to London, so that the hoped-for pleasure of seeing this brother and sister was denied her; but Miss Arabel Barrett was close at hand in the Wimpole Street home, and the sisters were much together. Mr. Barrett had never changed his mental attitude regarding the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth, nor that of any of his children, and while this was a constant and never-forgotten grief with Mrs. Browning, there seems no necessity for prolonged allusion to it. The matter can only be relegated to the realms of non-comprehension as the idiosyncrasy of an otherwise good man, of intelligence and much nobility of nature.

The Brownings were invited to Knebworth, to visit Lord Lytton, but they were unable to avail themselves of the pleasure because of proof-sheets and contingent demands which only writers with books in press can understand. Proof-sheets are unquestionably endowed with some super-human power of volition, and invariably arrive at the psychological moment when, if their author were being married or buried, the ceremony would have to be postponed until they were corrected. But the poets were not without pleasant interludes, either; as when Tennyson came from the Isle of Wight to London for three or four days, two of which he passed with the Brownings. He “dined, smoked, and opened his heart” to them; and concluded this memorable visit at the witching hour of half-past two in the morning, after reading “Maud” aloud the evening before from the proof-sheets. The date of this event is established by an inscription affixed to the back of a pen-and-ink sketch of Tennyson, made on that night by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and which is now in the possession of Robert Barrett Browning. This inscription, written by Robert Browning, reads: “Tennyson read his poem ‘Maud’ to E. B. B., R. B., Arabel, and Rossetti, on the evening of Sept. 27th, 1855, at 13, Dorset Street. Rossetti made this sketch of Tennyson, as he sat, reading, on one end of the sofa, E. B. B. being on the other end.” And this is signed, “R. B. March 6th, 1874 ... 19, Warwick Crescent.” As the date is Mrs. Browning’s birthday, it is easy to realize how, in that March of 1874, he was recalling tender and beloved memories. On the drawing itself Mrs. Browning had, at the time of the reading, copied the first two lines of “Maud.” Tennyson replied to a question from William Sharp, who in 1882 wrote to the Laureate to ask about this night, that he had “not the slightest recollection” of Rossetti’s presence; but the inscription on the picture establishes the fact. William Michael Rossetti was also one of the group, and a record that he made quite supports the fact of Tennyson’s unconsciousness of his brother’s presence, for he says: “So far as I remember the Poet-Laureate neither saw what my brother was doing nor knew of it afterward.” And as if every one of this gifted group present that night left on record some impression, Dante Gabriel Rossetti has noted that, after Tennyson’s reading, Browning read his “Fra Lippo Lippi,” and “with as much sprightly variation as there was in Tennyson of sustained continuity.” In a letter to Allingham, Rossetti also alluded to this night, and infused a mild reproach to Mrs. Browning in that her attention was diverted by “two not very exciting ladies”; and in a letter to Mrs. Tennyson, Mrs. Browning speaks of being “interrupted by some women friends whom I loved, but yet could not help wishing a little further just then, that I might sit in the smoke, and listen to the talk,” after the reading. So, from putting together, mosaic fashion, all the allusions made by the cloud of witnesses, the reader constructs a rather accurate picture of that night of the gods. Mrs. Browning, who “was born to poet-uses,” like the suitor of her own “Lady Geraldine,” was in a rapture of pleasure that evening, and of “Maud” she wrote: “The close is magnificent, full of power, and there are beautiful, thrilling lines all through. If I had a heart to spare, the Laureate would have won mine.” Tennyson’s voice she found “like an organ, music rather than speech,” and she was “captivated” by his naïveté, as he stopped every now and then to say, “There’s a wonderful touch!” Mrs. Browning writes to Mrs. Tennyson of “the deep pleasure we had in Mr. Tennyson’s visit to us.” She adds: