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 published _The Seraphim,
and Other Poems_; in 1839, _The Romaunt of the Page_, a volume of
ballads. In 1842 she contributed to the London _Athenæum_ some essays
on the Greek-Christian writers 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 called _A 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
WINDOWS was published in 1851, the SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE being
included in the same volume. In 1856 AURORA LEIGH appeared.
_Poems before Congress_ were 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 and Love, 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 brow
And 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.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 not make 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 called _The 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 some
of 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 of _The 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 mornings
Which my thought goes far to seek,
When, betwixt the folio’s turnings,
Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek.
Past the pane the mountain spreading
Swept the sheep-bell’s tinkling noise,
While a girlish voice was reading,
Somewhat low for ai’s and oi’s.”
R. H. STODDARD: _Prefatory Memoir_ to ‘Letters of Elizabeth Barrett
Browning addressed to Richard H. Horne.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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_.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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
was _out_. 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.
[Sidenote: Her illness.]
[Sidenote: 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 be removed
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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 we _all_ generally err by _reading too much_,
and out of proportion to what we _think_. 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 the _ne plus ultra_ of 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.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 have never met with any, written by men or by
women, more brilliant, spontaneous, and characteristic. This was _her_
form 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.
[Sidenote: 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 Preface_ to ‘Last Poems of Mrs. Browning.’
New York: James Miller, 1862.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 to _poetry_, 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.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 from _sectarianism_ in any sort
or sense, when I have eyes 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.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 yourself _ever_ by 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.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 have
_worked_ at poetry; it has not been 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.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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 our _serious_ poetry 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 the _Pan_
rhymes [occurring in the poem of ‘The Dead Pan’] might not separately
be justified _by the analogy of received rhymes_, although they have
not themselves been received. Perhaps there is not so irregular a rhyme
throughout the poem of _Pan_ as the “fel_low_” and “prunel_la_” 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 such trial 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.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: “Lady Geraldine.”]
[Sidenote: 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 Preface_ to ‘Last Poems of Mrs. Browning.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 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.
* * * * *