Statue of Savonarola, by E. Pazzi,
in the sala dei cinquecento, palazzo vecchio.

Mrs. Browning very wisely decided to let “Casa Guidi Windows” stand as written, with all the inconsistency between its first and second parts, as each reflected what she believed true at the time of writing; and it thus presents a most interesting and suggestive commentary on Italian politics between 1850 and 1853. Its discrepancies are such “as we are called upon to accept at every hour by the conditions of our nature,” she herself said of it, “implying the interval between aspiration and performance, between faith and disillusion, between hope and fact.” This discrepancy was more painful to her than it can be even to the most critical reader; but the very nature of the poem, its very fidelity to the conditions and impressions of the moment, give it great value, though these impressions were to be modified or canceled by those of a later time; it should stand as it is, if given to the world at all. And the courage to avow one’s self mistaken is not the least of the forms that moral courage may assume.

Regarding Pio Nono, Mrs. Browning is justified by history, notwithstanding the many amiable and beautiful qualities of the Pontiff which forever assure him a place in affection, if not in political confidence. Even his most disastrous errors were the errors of judgment rather than those of conscious intention. Pio Nono had the defects of his qualities, but loving and reverent pilgrimages are constantly made to that little chapel behind the iron railing in the old church of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura in Rome (occupying the site of the church founded by Constantine), where his body is entombed in a marble sarcophagus of the plainest design according to his own instructions; but the interior of the vestibule is richly decorated with mosaic paintings, the tribute of those who loved him.

Leopoldo was so kindly a man, so sincere in his work for the liberty of the press and for other important reforms, that it is no marvel that Mrs. Browning invested him with resplendence of gifts he did not actually possess, but which it was only logical to feel that such a man must have. Sometimes a too complete reliance on the ex pede Herculem method of judgment is misleading.

While the cause of Italian liberty had the entire sympathy of Robert Browning, he was yet little moved to use it as a poetic motive. Professor Hall Griffin suggests that it is possible that Browning deliberately chose not to enter a field which his wife so particularly made her own; but that is the less tenable as they never discussed their poetic work with each other, and as a rule rarely showed to each other a single poem until it was completed.

The foreign society in Florence at this time included some delightful American sojourners, for, beside the Storys and Hiram Powers (an especial friend of the Brownings), there were George S. Hillard, George William Curtis, and the Marchesa d’Ossoli with her husband,—all of whom were welcomed at Casa Guidi. The English society then in Florence was, as Mrs. Browning wrote to Miss Mitford, “kept up much after the old English models, with a proper disdain for continental simplicities of expense; and neither my health nor our pecuniary circumstances,” she says, “would admit of our entering it. The fact is, we are not like our child, who kisses everybody who smiles on him! You can scarcely imagine to yourself how we have retreated from the kind advances of the English here, and struggled with hands and feet to keep out of this gay society.” But it is alluring to imagine the charm of their chosen circle, the Storys always first and nearest, and these other gifted and interesting friends.

Mr. Story is so universally thought of as a sculptor that it is not always realized how eminent he was in the world of letters as well. Two volumes of his poems contain many of value, and a few, as the “Cleopatra,” “An Estrangement,” and the immortal “Io Victis,” that the world would not willingly let die; his “Roba di Roma” is one of those absolutely indispensable works regarding the Eternal City; and several other books of his, in sketch and criticism, enrich literature. A man of the most courtly and distinguished manner, of flawless courtesy, an artist of affluent expressions, it is not difficult to realize how congenial and delightful was his companionship, as well as that of his accomplished wife, to the Brownings. Indeed, no biographical record could be made of either household, with any completeness, that did not largely include the other. In all the lovely chronicles of literature and life there is no more beautiful instance of an almost lifelong friendship than that between Robert Browning and William Wetmore Story.

In this spring of 1850 Browning was at work on his “Christmas Eve and Easter Day,” and Casa Guidi preserved a liberal margin of quiet and seclusion. “You can scarcely imagine,” wrote Mrs. Browning, “the retired life we live.... We drive day by day through the lovely Cascine, only sweeping through the city. Just such a window where Bianca Capello looked out to see the Duke go by,—and just such a door where Tasso stood, and where Dante drew his chair out to sit.”

When Curtis visited Florence he wrote to Browning begging to be permitted to call, and he was one of the welcomed visitors in Casa Guidi. Browning took him on many of those romantic excursions with which the environs of Florence abound,—to Settignano, where Michael Angelo was born; to the old Roman amphitheater in Fiesole; to that somber, haunted summit of San Miniato, and to Vallombrosa, where he played to Curtis some of the old Gregorian chants on an organ in the monastery. Afterward, in a conversation with Longfellow, Mr. Curtis recalled a hymn by Pergolese that Browning had played for him.

Tennyson’s poem, “The Princess,” went into the third edition that winter, and Mrs. Browning observed that she knew of no poet, having claim solely through poetry, who had attained so certain a success with so little delay. Hearing that Tennyson had remarked that the public “hated poetry,” Mrs. Browning commented that, “divine poet as he was, and no laurel being too leafy for him,” he must yet be unreasonable if he were not gratified with “so immediate and so conspicuous a success.”

Browning’s “imprisoned splendor” found expression that winter in several lyrics, which were included in the new (two volume) edition of his poems.

Among these were the “Meeting at Night,” “Parting at Morning,” “A Woman’s Last Word,” and “Evelyn Hope.” “Love among the Ruins,” “Old Pictures in Florence,” “Saul,” and his “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” all belong to this group. In that ardent love poem, “A Woman’s Last Word,” occur the lines:

“Teach me, only teach, Love!
As I ought
I will speak thy speech, Love,
Think thy thought—

“Meet, if thou require it,
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands.”

No lyric that Robert Browning ever wrote is more haunting in its power and sweetness, or more rich in significance, than “Evelyn Hope,” with “that piece of geranium flower” in the glass beside her beginning to die. The whole scene is suggested by this one detail, and in characterization of the young girl are these inimitable lines,—

“The good stars met in your horoscope,
Made you of spirit, fire, and dew—
······
Yet one thing, one, in my soul’s full scope,
Either I missed or itself missed me;
······
So, hush,—I will give you this leaf to keep;
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!
There, that is our secret: go to sleep!
You will wake, and remember, and understand.”

Fresco of Dante, by Giotto, in the Bargello, Florence.

Casa Guidi Windows.

Mrs. Browning’s touching lyric, “A Child’s Grave at Florence,” was published in the Athenæum that winter; and in this occur the simple but appealing stanzas,—

“Oh, my own baby on my knees,
My leaping, dimpled treasure,
······
But God gives patience, Love learns strength,
And Faith remembers promise;
······
Still mine! maternal rights serene
Not given to another!
The crystal bars shine faint between
The souls of child and mother.”

To this day, that little grave in the English cemetery in Florence, with its “A. A. E. C.” is sought out by the visitor. To Mrs. Browning the love for her own child taught her the love of all mothers. In “Only a Curl” are the lines:

“O children! I never lost one,—
But my arm’s round my own little son,
And Love knows the secret of Grief.”

Florence “bristled with cannon” that winter, but nothing decisive occurred. The faith of the Italian people in Pio Nono, however, grew less. Mr. Kirkup, the antiquarian, still carried on his controversy with Bezzi as to which of them were the more entitled to the glory of discovering the Dante portrait, and in the spring there occurred the long-deferred marriage of Mrs. Browning’s sister Henrietta to Captain Surtees Cook, the attitude of Mr. Barrett being precisely the same as on the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth to Robert Browning. The death of Wordsworth was another of the events of this spring, leaving vacant the Laureateship. The Athenæum at once advocated the appointment of Mrs. Browning, as one “eminently suitable under a female sovereign.” Other literary authorities coincided with this view, it seeming a sort of poetic justice that a woman poet should be Laureate to a Queen. The Athenæum asserted that “there is no living poet of either sex who can prefer a higher claim than Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” but the honor was finally conferred upon Tennyson, with the ardent approbation of the Brownings, who felt that his claim was rightly paramount.

In the early summer the Marchese and Marchesa d’Ossoli, with their child, sailed on that ill-starred voyage whose tragic ending startled the literary world of that day. Their last evening in Florence was passed with the Brownings. The Marchesa expressed a fear of the voyage that, after its fatal termination, was recalled by her friends as being almost prophetic. Curiously she gave a little Bible to the infant son of the poets as a presentation from her own little child; and Robert Barrett Browning still treasures, as a strange relic, the book on whose fly-leaf is written “In memory of Angelino d’Ossoli.” Mrs. Browning had a true regard for the Marchesa, of whom she spoke as “a very interesting person, thoughtful, spiritual, in her habitual mode of mind.”

In his poetic creed, Browning deprecated nothing more entirely (to use a mild term where a stronger would not be inappropriate) than that the poet should reveal his personal feeling in his poem; and to the dramatic character of his own work he held tenaciously. He rebuked the idea that Shakespeare “unlocked his heart” to his readers, and he warns them off from the use of any fancied latch-key to his own inner citadel.

“Which of you did I enable
Once to slip inside my breast,
There to catalogue and label
What I like least, what love best?”

And in another poem the reader will recall how fervently he thanks God that “even the meanest of His creatures”

“Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her!”

It was the knowledge of this intense and pervading conviction of her husband’s that kept Mrs. Browning so long from showing to him her exquisitely tender and sacred self-revelation in the “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” Yet it was in that very “One Word More” where Browning thanks God for the “two soul-sides,” that he most simply reveals himself, and also in “Prospice” and in this “Christmas Eve and Easter Day.” This poem, with its splendor of vision, was published in 1850, with an immediate sale of two hundred copies, after which for the time the demand ceased. William Sharp well designates it as a “remarkable Apologia for Christianity,” for it can be almost thought of in connection with Newman’s “Apologia pro vita sua,” and as not remote from the train of speculative thought which Matthew Arnold wrought into his “Literature and Dogma.” It is very impressive to see how the very content of Hegelian Dialectic is the key-note of Browning’s art. “The concrete and material content of a life of perfected knowledge and volition means one thing, only, love,” teaches Hegelian philosophy. This, too, is the entire message of Browning’s poetry. Man must love God in the imperfect manifestation which is all he can offer of God. He must relate the imperfect expression to the perfect aspiration.

“All I aspired to be
And was not—comforts me.”

In the unfaltering search for the Divine Ideal is the true reward.

“One great aim, like a guiding star, above—
Which tasks strength, wisdom, stateliness, to lift
His manhood to the height that takes the prize.”

Browning conceived and presented the organic idea and ideal of life, in its fullness, its intensity, as perhaps few poets have ever done. He would almost place a positive sin above a negative virtue. To live intensely, even if it be sinfully, was to Browning’s vision to be on the upward way, rather than to be in a state of negative good. The spirit of man is its own witness of the presence of God. Life cannot be truly lived in any fantastic isolation.

“Just when we’re safest, there’s a sunset touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death,
A chorus ending from Euripides.”

With Browning, as with Spinoza, there is an impatience, too, with the perpetual references to death, and they both constantly turn to the everlasting truth of life. “It is this harping on death that I despise so much,” exclaimed Browning, in the later years of his life, in a conversation with a friend. “In fiction, in poetry, in art, in literature this shadow of death, call it what you will,—despair, negation, indifference,—is upon us. But what fools who talk thus!... Why, death is life, just as our daily momentarily dying body is none the less alive, and ever recruiting new forces of existence. Without death, which is our word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life.”

After the completion of “Christmas Eve and Easter Day,” Mrs. Browning questioned her husband about the apparent asceticism of the second part of the poem, and he replied that he meant it to show only one side of the matter. “Don’t think,” she wrote to a friend, “that Robert has taken to the cilix,—indeed he has not, but it is his way to see things as passionately as other people feel them.”

Browning teaches in this poem that faith is an adventure of the spirit, the aspiration felt, even if unnamed. But as to renunciation,—

“‘Renounce the world!’—Ah, were it done
By merely cutting one by one
Your limbs off, with your wise head last,
How easy were it!”

The renunciation that the poet sees is not so simple. It is not to put aside all the allurements of life, but to use them nobly; to persist in the life of the spirit, to offer love for hatred, truth for falsehood, generous self-sacrifice rather than to grasp advantages,—to live, not to forsake the common daily lot. It is, indeed, the philosophy amplified that is found in the words of Jesus, “I pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.”

The Brownings remained till late in the summer in their Casa Guidi home, detained at first by the illness of Mrs. Browning, after which they decided to postpone going to England until another year. In the late summer they went for a few weeks to Siena, where, two miles outside the walls, they found a seven-roomed villa with a garden and vineyard and olive orchard, and “a magnificent view of a noble sweep of country, undulating hills and verdure, and on one side the great Maremma extending to the foot of the Roman mountains.” They were located on a little hill called Poggia dei venti, with all the winds of the heavens, indeed, blowing about them, and with overflowing quantities of milk and bread and wine, and a loggia at the top of the villa. Mrs. Browning found herself rapidly recovering strength, and their comfort was further extended by finding a library in Siena, where, for three francs a month, they had access to the limited store of books which seem so luxurious in Italy. The boy Browning was delighted with his new surroundings, his sole infelicity being his inability to reach the grapes clustering over the trellises; he missed the Austrian band that made music (or noise) for his delectation in Florence, although to compensate for this privation he himself sang louder than ever. In after years Mr. Browning laughingly related this anecdote of his son’s childhood: “I was one day playing a delicate piece of Chopin’s on the piano, and hearing a loud noise outside, hastily stopped playing when my little boy ran in, and my wife exclaimed: ‘How could you leave off playing when Penini brought three drums to accompany you?’”

For all this bloom and beauty in Siena they paid a little less than fifteen francs a week. Soon after their arrival they learned of the shipwreck in which the Marchese and Marchesa d’Ossoli and the little Angelino all perished, and the tragedy deeply impressed Mrs. Browning. “The work that the Marchesa was preparing upon Italy would have been more equal to her faculties than anything she has ever produced,” said Mrs. Browning, “her other writings being curiously inferior to the impression made by her conversation.”

Before returning to Florence the Brownings passed a week in the town of Siena to visit the pictures and churches, but they found it pathetic to leave the villa, and especially harrowing to their sensibilities to part with the pig. There is consolation, however, for most mortal sorrows, and the Brownings found it in their intense interest in Sienese art. The wonderful pulpit of the Duomo, the work of Niccola Pisano; the font of San Giovanni; the Sodomas, and the Libreria (the work of Pius III, which he built when he was Cardinal, and in which, at the end of the aisle, is a picture of his own elevation to the Papal throne, painted after his death) fascinated their attention. The Brownings found it dazzling to enter this interior, all gold and color, with the most resplendent decorative effects. They followed in the footsteps of Saint Catherine, as do all pilgrims to Siena, and climbed the hill to the Oratorio di Santa Caterina in Fontebranda, and read that inscription: “Here she stood and touched that precious vessel and gift of God, blessed Catherine, who in her life did so many miracles.” They lingered, too, in the Cappella Santa Caterina in San Domenico, where Catherine habitually prayed, where she beheld visions and received her mystic revelations. They loitered in the piazza, watching the stars hang over that aerial tower, “Il Mangia,” and drove to San Gimignano, with its picturesque medieval atmosphere.

Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence,
known as the Duomo.

It was in the autumn of 1850 that Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” first privately and then anonymously printed, was acknowledged by the poet. The Brownings read extracts from it in the Examiner, and they were deeply moved by it. “Oh, there’s a poet!” wrote Mrs. Browning. At last, “by a sort of miracle,” they obtained a copy, and Mrs. Browning was carried away with its exquisite touch, its truth and earnestness. “The book has gone to my heart and soul,” she says, “I think it full of deep pathos and beauty.”

An interesting visitor dropped in at Casa Guidi in the person of a grandson of Goethe; and his mission to Florence, to meet the author of “Paracelsus” and discuss with him the character of the poem, was a tribute to its power. Mrs. Browning, whose poetic ideals were so high, writing to a friend of their guest, rambled on into some allusions to poetic art, and expressed her opinion that all poets should take care to teach the world that poetry is a divine thing. “Rather perish every verse I ever wrote, for one,” she said, “than help to drag down an inch that standard of poetry which, for the sake of humanity as well as literature, should be kept high.”

In “Aurora Leigh” she expresses the same sentiment in the lines:

“I, who love my art,
Would never wish it lower to suit my stature.”

Full of affection and interest are Mrs. Browning’s letters to her husband’s sister, Sarianna, who, with her father, is now living in Hatcham, near London. In the spring of 1852, after passing the winter in Florence, the Brownings set out for England; the plan at first being to go south to Naples, pause at Rome, and then go northward; but this was finally abandoned, and they proceeded directly to Venice, where Mrs. Browning was enchanted with life set in a scenic loveliness of “music and stars.”

“I have been between heaven and earth since our arrival in Venice,” she writes. “The heaven of it is ineffable. Never have I touched the skirts of so celestial a place. The beauty of the architecture, the silver trails of water between all that gorgeous color and carving, the enchanting silence, the moonlight, the music, the gondolas,—I mix it all up together....”

In the divine beauty of Venetian evenings they sat in the white moonlight in the piazza of San Marco, taking their coffee and the French papers together. Or they would go to the opera, where for a ridiculously small sum they had an entire box to themselves. But while Mrs. Browning longed “to live and die in Venice, and never go away,” the climate did not agree with Mr. Browning, and they journeyed on toward Paris, stopping one night at Padua and driving out to Arqua for Petrarca’s sake. In Milan Mrs. Browning climbed the three hundred and fifty steps, to the topmost pinnacle of the glorious cathedral. At Como they abandoned the diligence for the boat, sailing through that lovely chain of lakes to Flüelen, and thence to Lucerne, the scenery everywhere impressing Mrs. Browning as being so sublime that she “felt as if standing in the presence of God.” From Lucerne they made a détour through Germany, pausing at Strasburg, and arriving in Paris in July. This journey initiated an absence of almost a year and a half from Italy. They had let their apartment, so they were quite free to wander, and they were even considering the possibility of remaining permanently in Paris, whose brilliant intellectual life appealed to them both. After a brief sojourn in the French capital, they went on to England, and they had rather an embarrassment of riches in the number of houses proffered them, for Tennyson begged them to accept the loan of his house and servants at Twickenham, and Joseph Arnould was equally urgent that they should occupy his town house. But they took lodgings, instead, locating in Devonshire Street, and London life proceeds to swallow them up after its own absorbing fashion. They breakfast with Rogers, and pass an evening with the Carlyles; Forster gives a “magnificent dinner” for them; Mrs. Fanny Kemble calls, and sends them tickets for her reading of “Hamlet”; and the Proctors, Mrs. Jameson, and other friends abound. They go to New Cross, Hatcham, to visit Mr. Browning’s father and sister, where the little Penini “is taken into adoration” by his grandfather. Mrs. Browning’s sisters show her every affection, and her brothers come; but her father, in reply to her own and her husband’s letter, simply sends back to her, with their seals unbroken, all the letters she had written to him from Italy. “So there’s the end,” she says; “I cannot, of course, write again. God takes it all into His own hands, and I wait.” The warm affection of her sisters cheered her, Mrs. Surtees Cook (Henrietta Barrett) coming up from Somersetshire for a week’s visit, and her sister Arabel being invited with her. It was during this sojourn in London that Bayard Taylor, poet and critic, and afterward American Minister Plenipotentiary to Germany, called upon the Brownings, bringing a letter of introduction from Hillard.

The poet’s wife impressed Taylor as almost a spirit figure, with her pallor and slender grace, and the little Penini, “a blue-eyed, golden-haired boy, babbling his little sentences in Italian,” strayed in like a sunbeam. While Taylor was with them, Mr. Kenyon called, and after his departure Browning remarked to his guest: “There goes one of the most splendid men living,—a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to be known all over the world as Kenyon the Magnificent.”

The poets were overwhelmed with London hospitalities, and as Mrs. Browning gave her maid, Wilson, leave of absence to visit her own family, the care of little Pen fell upon her. He was in a state of “deplorable grief” for his nurse, “and after all,” laughed Mrs. Browning, “the place of nursery maid is more suitable to me than that of poetess (or even poet’s wife) in this obstreperous London.”

In the late September the Brownings crossed to Paris, Carlyle being their traveling companion, and after an effort to secure an apartment near the Madeleine, they finally established themselves in the Avenue des Champs Élysées (No. 128), where they had pretty, sunny rooms, tastefully furnished, with the usual French lavishness in mirrors and clocks,—all for two hundred francs a month, which was hardly more than they had paid for the dreary Grosvenor Street lodgings in London. Mrs. Browning was very responsive to that indefinable exhilaration of atmosphere that pervades the French capital, and the little Penini was charmed with the gayety and brightness. Mrs. Browning enjoyed the restaurant dining, à la carte, “and mixing up one’s dinner with heaps of newspapers, and the ‘solution’ by Émile de Girardin,” who suggested, it seems, “that the next President of France should be a tailor.” Meantime she writes to a friend that “the ‘elf’ is flourishing in all good fairyhood, with a scarlet rose leaf on each cheek.” They found themselves near neighbors of Béranger, and frequently saw him promenading the avenue in a white hat, and they learned that he lived very quietly and “kept out of scrapes, poetical and political.” Mrs. Browning notes that they would like to know Béranger, were the stars propitious, and that no accredited letter of introduction to him would have been refused, but that they could not make up their minds to go to his door and introduce themselves as vagrant minstrels. To George Sand they brought a letter from Mazzini, and although they heard she “had taken vows against seeing strangers,” Mrs. Browning declared she would not die, if she could help it, without meeting the novelist who had so captivated her. Mazzini’s letter, with one from themselves, was sent to George Sand through mutual friends, and the following reply came:

The visit must have been mutually satisfactory, for it was repeated two or three times, and they found her simple, “without a shade of affectation or consciousness.” Another pleasure they had was in meeting Lamartine, who took the initiative in asking to be allowed to call on them. After their arrival in Paris Carlyle passed several evenings with them, and Mrs. Browning felt, with her husband, that he was one of the most interesting of men, “highly picturesque” in conversation. Her sympathetic insight gave her always the key and the clue to character, and perhaps no one ever read Carlyle more truly than she, when she interpreted his bitterness only as melancholy, and his scorn as sensibility.

The Brownings had not been long in Paris before they were invited to a reception at Lady Elgin’s, where they met Madame Mohl, who at once cordially urged their coming to her “evenings,” to meet her French celebrities. Lady Elgin was domiciled in the old Faubourg Saint Germain, and received every Monday evening from eight to twelve, sans façon, people being in morning dress, and being served with simple refreshment of tea and cakes. Lady Elgin expressed the hope that the Brownings would come to her on every one of these evenings, Mrs. Browning said that she had expected “to see Balzac’s duchesses and hommes de lettres on all sides,” but she found it less notable, though very agreeable. The elder Browning and his daughter pay a visit to them, greatly to Mrs. Browning’s enjoyment. At this time they half contemplated living permanently in Paris, if it seemed that Mrs. Browning could endure the climate, and she records, during the visit of her husband’s father and sister, that if they do remain in Paris they hope to induce these beloved members of the family to also establish themselves there. As it turned out, the Brownings passed only this one winter in the French capital, but the next spring Mr. Browning (père) and his daughter Sarianna took up their residence in Paris, where they remained during the remainder of his life. Mrs. Browning was always deeply attached to her husband’s sister. “Sarianna is full of accomplishment and admirable sense,” she wrote of her, and the visit of both gave her great pleasure. The coup d’état took place early in December, but they felt no alarm. Mrs. Browning expressed her great faith in the French people, and declared the talk about “military despotism” to be all nonsense. The defect she saw in M. Thiers was “a lack of breadth of view, which helped to bring the situation to a dead lock, on which the French had no choice than to sweep the board clean and begin again.”

It was during this early winter, with French politics and French society and occasional spectacles and processions extending from the Carrousel to the Arc de l’Étoile, that Browning wrote that essay on Shelley, which his publisher of that time, Mr. Moxon, had requested to accompany a series of Shelley letters which had been discovered, but which were afterward found to be fraudulent. The edition was at once suppressed; but a few copies had already gone out, and, as Professor Dowden says, “The essay is interesting as Browning’s only considerable piece of prose;... for him the poet of ‘Prometheus Unbound’ was not that beautiful and ineffectual angel of Matthew Arnold’s fancy, beating in the void his luminous wings. A great moral purpose looked forth from Shelley’s work, as it does from all lofty works of art.” It was “the dream of boyhood,” Browning tells us, to render justice to Shelley; and he availed himself of this opportunity with alluring eagerness. His interpretation of Shelley is singularly noble and in accord with all the great spiritual teachings of his own poetic work. Browning’s plea that there is no basis for any adequate estimate of Shelley, who “died before his youth was ended,” cannot but commend its justice; and he urges that in any measurement of Shelley as a man he must be contemplated “at his ultimate spiritual stature” and not judged by the mistakes of ten years before when in his entire immaturity of character.

How all that infinite greatness of spirit and almost divine breadth of comprehension that characterize Robert Browning reveal themselves in this estimate of Shelley. It is seeing human errors and mistakes as God sees them,—the temporary faults, defects, imperfections of the soul on its onward way to perfection. This was the attitude of Browning’s profoundest convictions regarding human life.

“Eternal process moving on;
From state to state the spirit walks.”

This achievement of the divine ideal for man is not within the possibilities of the brief sojourn on earth, but what does the transition called death do for man but to

“Interpose at the difficult moment, snatch Saul, the mistake,
Saul, the failure, the ruin he seems now,—and bid him awake
From the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find himself set
Clear and safe in new light and new life,—a new harmony yet
To be run, and continued, and ended—who knows?—or endure!
The man taught enough by life’s dream, of the rest to make sure.”

Browning’s message in its completeness was invariably that which is imaged, too, in these lines from Mrs. Browning’s “Aurora Leigh”:

“And take for a worthier stage the soul itself,
Its shifting fancies and celestial lights.”

For it is only in this drama of the infinite life that the spiritual man can be tested. It was from the standpoint of an actor on this celestial stage that Browning considered Shelley. In the entire range of Browning’s art the spiritual man is imaged as a complex and individualized spark of the divine force. He is seen for a flitting moment on his way toward a divine destiny.

Professor Hall Griffin states as his belief that Browning’s paper was to some degree inspired by that of Joseph Milsand on himself, which appeared in August, 1851, in the Revue des Deux Mondes in which Milsand commended Browning’s work “as pervaded by an intense belief in the importance of the individual soul.”

To Browning this winter was enchanted by the initiation of his friendship with Milsand, the distinguished French scholar and critic, who had already made a name as a philosophic thinker and had published a book on Ruskin (L’Esthétique Anglaise), and who was a discerner of spirits in poetic art as well. About the time that “Paracelsus” appeared, Milsand had seen an extract from the poem that captivated him, and he at once sent for the volume. He had also read, with the deepest interest, Browning’s “Christmas Eve and Easter Day.” He was contributing to the Revue des Deux Mondes two papers on La Poésie Anglaise depuis Byron, the first of which, on Tennyson, had appeared the previous August. Milsand was about completing the second paper of this series (on Browning), and it happened just at this time that Miss Mitford’s “Recollections of a Literary Life” was published, in which, writing of the Brownings, she had told the story of that tragic death of Mrs. Browning’s brother Edward, who had been drowned at Torquay. In these days, when, as Emerson rhymes the fact,

“Every thought is public,
Every nook is wide,
The gossips spread each whisper
And the gods from side to side,”

it is a little difficult to quite comprehend, even in comprehending Mrs. Browning’s intense sensitiveness and the infinite sacredness of this grief, why she should have been so grieved at Miss Mitford’s tender allusion to an accident that was, by its very nature, public, and which must have been reported in the newspapers of the day. Mrs. Browning was always singularly free from any morbid states, from any tendency to the idée fixe, to which a semi-invalid condition is peculiarly and pardonably liable; but she said, in an affectionate letter to Miss Mitford:

It is said there are no secrets in heaven, and in that respect, at least, the twentieth century is not unlike the celestial state; and it is almost as hard a task for the imagination to comprehend the reserve in all personal matters that characterized the mid-nineteenth century as it would be to enter into absolute comprehension of the medieval mind; but Mrs. Browning’s own pathetic deprecation of her feelings regarding this is its own passport to the sympathy of the reader. To Miss Mitford’s reply, full of sympathetic comprehension and regret, Mrs. Browning replied that she understood, “and I thank you,” she added, “and love you, which is better. Now, let us talk of reasonable things.” For Mrs. Browning had that rare gift and grace of instantly closing the chapter, and turning the page, and ceasing from all allusion to any subject of regret, after the inevitable reference of the moment had been made. She had the mental energy and the moral buoyancy to drop the matter, and this characteristic reveals how normal she was, and how far from any morbidness.

Milsand, with a delicacy that Robert Browning never forgot, came to him to ask his counsel regarding the inclusion of this tragic accident that had left such traces on his wife’s genius and character (traces that are revealed in immortal expression in her poem, “De Profundis,” written some years later), and Browning was profoundly touched by his consideration. Grasping both Milsand’s hands, he exclaimed, “Only a Frenchman could have done this!” A friendship initiated under circumstances so unusual, and with such reverent intuition of Mrs. Browning’s feelings, could not but hold its place apart to them both.

The Brownings found Paris almost as ineffable in beauty in the early spring as was their Florence. “It’s rather dangerous to let the charm of Paris work,” laughed Mrs. Browning; “the honey will be clogging our feet soon, and we shall find it difficult to go away.”

They had a delightful winter socially, as well; they went to Ary Scheffer’s and heard Madame Viardot, then in the height of her artistic fame; George Sand sent them tickets for the première of “Les Vacances de Pandolphe”; they went to the Vaudeville to see the “Dame aux Camellias,” of which Mrs. Browning said that she did not agree with the common cry about its immorality. To her it was both moral and human, “but I never will go to see it again,” she says, “for it almost broke my heart. The exquisite acting, the too literal truth to nature....” They met Paul de Musset, but missed his brother Alfred that winter, whose poems they both cared for.

The elder Browning retained through his life that singular talent for caricature drawing that had amused and fascinated his son in the poet’s childhood; and during his visit to the Brownings in Paris he had produced many of these drawings which became the delight of his grandson as well. The Paris streets furnished him with some inimitable suggestions, and Robert Barrett Browning, to this day, preserves many of these keen and humorous and extremely clever drawings of his grandfather. Thierry, the historian, who was suffering from blindness, sent to the Brownings a request that they would call on him, with which they immediately complied, and they were much interested in his views on France. The one disappointment of that season was in not meeting Victor Hugo, whose fiery hostility to the new régime caused it to be more expedient for him to reside quite beyond possible sight of the gilded dome of the Invalides.

In June the Brownings returned to London, where they domiciled themselves in Welbeck Street (No. 58), Mrs. Browning’s sisters both being near, Mrs. Surtees Cook having established herself only twenty doors away, and Miss Arabel Barrett being in close proximity in Wimpole Street. They were invited to Kenyon’s house at Wimbledon, where Landor was a guest, whom Mrs. Browning found “looking as young as ever, and full of passionate energy,” and who talked with characteristic exaggeration of Louis Napoleon and of the President of the French nation. Landor “detested” the one and “loathed” the other; and as he did not accept Talleyrand’s ideal of the use of language, he by no means concealed these sentiments. Mazzini immediately sought the Brownings, his “pale, spiritual face” shining, and his “intense eyes full of melancholy illusions.” He brought Mrs. Carlyle with him, Mrs. Browning finding her “full of thought, and feeling, and character.” Miss Mulock, who had then written “The Ogilvies,” and had also read her title clear to some poetic recognition, was in evidence that season, as were Mr. and Mrs. Monckton Milnes, and Fanny Kemble was also a brilliant figure in the social life. Nor was the London of that day apparently without a taste for the sorceress and the soothsayer, for no less a personage than Lord Stanhope was, it seems, showing to the elect the “spirits of the sun” in a crystal ball, which Lady Blessington had bought from an Egyptian magician and had sold again. Lady Blessington declared she had no understanding of the use of it, but it was on record that the initiated could therein behold Oremus, Spirit of the Sun. Both the crystal ball and the seers were immensely sought, notwithstanding the indignation expressed by Mr. Chorley, who regarded the combination of social festivities and crystal gazing as eminently scandalous. Which element he considered the more dangerous is not on the palimpsest that records the story of these days. Lord Stanhope invited the Brownings to these occult occasions of intermingled attractions, and Mrs. Browning writes: “For my part, I endured both luncheon and spiritual phenomena with great equanimity.” An optician of London took advantage of the popular demand and offered a fine assortment of crystal ball spheres, at prices which quite restricted their sale to the possessors of comfortable rent-rolls, and Lord Stanhope asserted that a great number of persons resorted to these balls to divine the future, without the courage to confess it. One wonders as to whom “the American Corinna, in yellow silk,” in London, that season, could have been?

The Brownings were invited to a country house in Farnham, to meet Charles Kingsley, who impressed them with his genial and tender kindness, and while they thought some of his social views wild and theoretical, they loved his earnestness and originality, and believed he could not be “otherwise than good and noble.” It was during this summer (according to William Michael Rossetti) that Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti first met, Rossetti coming to call on them in company with William Allingham. On August 30, from Chapel House, Twickenham, Tennyson wrote to Mrs. Browning of the birth of his son, Hallam, to which she replied: