"Nothing is small!
No lily-muffled hum of summer-bee
But finds some coupling with the spinning stars;
No pebble at your foot but proves a sphere:
. . . . . Earth's crammed with Heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes."
Among Mrs. Browning's smaller poems, 'Crowned and Buried' is,
notwithstanding serious defects of technique, one of the most virile
things she has written; indeed, some of her finest lines are to be found
in it. In 'The Cry of the Children' and in 'Cowper's Grave' the pathos
is most true and deep. 'Lord Walter's Wife' is an even more courageous
vindication of the feminine essence than 'Aurora Leigh'; and her 'Vision
of Poets' is said to "vie in beauty with Tennyson's own." The fine
thought and haunting beauty of 'A Musical Instrument,' with its
matchless climax, need not be dwelt on.
During her fifteen years' residence in Florence she threw herself with
great enthusiasm into Italian affairs, and wrote some political poems of
varying merit, whose interest necessarily faded away when the occasion
passed. But among those poems inspired by the struggle for freedom,
'Casa Guidi Windows' comes close to the 'Sonnets from the Portuguese'
and 'Aurora Leigh,' and holds an enduring place for its high poetry, its
musical, sonorous verse, and the sustained intellectual vigor of
composition. Her volume of 'Last Poems' contains, among much inferior
matter, some of her finest and most touching work, as 'A Musical
Instrument,' 'The Forced Recruit,' and 'Mother and Poet,' Peter Bayne
says of her in his 'Great Englishwomen':--"In melodiousness and splendor
of poetic gift Mrs. Browning stands ... first among women. She may not
have the knowledge of life, the insight into character, the
comprehensiveness of some, but we must all agree that a poet's far more
essential qualities are hers: usefulness, fervor, a noble aspiration,
and above all a tender, far-reaching nature, loving and beloved, and
touching the hearts of her readers with some virtue from its depths. She
seemed even in her life something of a spirit; and her view of life's
sorrow and shame, of its hearty and eternal hope, is something like that
which one might imagine a spirit's to be." Whether political, or
sociological, or mystical, or sentimental, or impossible, there is about
all that Mrs. Browning has written an enduring charm of picturesqueness,
of romance, and of a pure enthusiasm for art. "Art for Art," she cries,
"And good for God, himself the essential Good!
We'll keep our aims sublime, our eyes erect,
Although our woman-hands should shake and fail."
This was her achievement--her hands did not fail!
Her husband's words will furnish, perhaps, the best conclusion to this
slight study:--"You are wrong," he said, "quite wrong--she has genius; I
am only a painstaking fellow. Can't you imagine a clever sort of angel
who plots and plans, and tries to build up something,--he wants to make
you see it as he sees it, shows you one point of view, carries you off
to another, hammering into your head the thing he wants you to
understand; and whilst this bother is going on, God Almighty turns you
off a little star--that's the difference between us. The true creative
power is hers, not mine."