"My own, see where the years conduct.
At first 't was something our two souls
Should mix as mists do; each is sucked
Into each now, on the new stream rolls,
Whatever rocks obstruct.
"Think when our one soul understands
The great Word which makes all things new,
When earth breaks up and heaven expands,
How will the change strike me and you
In the house not made with hands?
"Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine,
Your heart anticipate my heart,
You must be just before in fine,
See and make me see for my part
New depths of the Divine."
The whole poem "By the Fireside" should be quoted to tell the story from
his side; but we will select only the close for our purpose. After
describing how their love had led on to its own consummation, he says:--
"I am named and known by that hour's feat,
There took my station and degree.
So grew my own small life complete
As Nature obtained her best of me--
One born to love you, sweet!
"And to watch you sit by the fireside now,
Back again, as you mutely sit
Musing by fire-light, that great brow
And the spirit-small hand propping it
Yonder, my heart knows how!
"So the earth has gained by one man more,
And the gain of earth must be Heaven's gain too,
And the whole is well worth thinking o'er
When the autumn comes; as I mean to do
One day, as I said before."
The autumn time has come now to Browning, and he has had ample time to
think it o'er; for the "perfect wife," the "Leonor," has lain under the
grasses and violets of the English burying-ground in Florence for
twenty-five years. In the same poem from which we have quoted, he
says:--
"How well I know what I mean to do
When the long dark autumn evenings come!
And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue?
With the music of all thy voices dumb
In life's November, too!
"I shall be found by the fire, suppose,
O'er a great wise book as beseemeth age,
While the shutters flap as the cross wind blows,
And I turn the page, and I turn the page,
Not verse now, only prose!"
It is sad to think that he should be left solitary by his fire and with
his books, but he has much that is beautiful to look back upon,--much,
too, that is beautiful to look forward to, let us hope; and he is
surrounded by many friends, and devotedly attached to the one son who
was the only fruit of this royal marriage of genius.
The house where the poets lived together for fourteen years in Florence
has been thus described:--
"Those who have known 'Casa Guidi' as it was can never forget the
square anteroom with its great picture and piano-forte at which the
boy Browning passed many an hour,--the little dining-room covered
with tapestry, and where hung medallions of Tennyson, Carlyle, and
Robert Browning,--the long room filled with plaster casts and
studies, which was Mr. Browning's retreat,--and dearest of all, the
large drawing-room where _she_ always sat. It opens upon a balcony
filled with plants, and looks out upon the old iron-gray church of
Santa Felice.
"There was something about this room which seemed to make it a
proper and especial haunt for poets. The dark shadows and subdued
light gave it a dreamy look, which was enhanced by the
tapestry-covered walls and the old pictures of saints that looked
out sadly from their carved frames of black wood. Large bookcases
constructed of specimens of Florentine carving were brimming over
with wise-looking books. Tables were covered with more gayly-bound
volumes, the gifts of brother authors. Dante's grave profile, a
cast of Keats's face and brow taken after death, a pen-and-ink
sketch of Tennyson, little paintings of the boy Browning, all
attracted the eye in turn, and gave rise to a thousand musings. A
quaint mirror, easy-chairs and sofas, and a hundred nothings, which
always add an indescribable charm, were all massed in this room.
But the glory of all, and that which sanctified all, was seated in
a low arm-chair near the door. A small table strewn with
writing-materials, books, and newspapers, was always by her side."
Here Mrs. Browning held her small court, and here she entertained in the
course of these years many of the most famous men and women of her time.
Almost all visitors to Florence, especially English and American, sought
her acquaintance, and all were kindly received by her. The conversation
was always earnest there; she demanded a great deal of a person,--one
felt it instinctively; and few came to waste her time upon trifles. Her
own conversation was especially earnest, sometimes vivid, and lighted up
by a humor peculiarly her own. She cared nothing for talk about people.
Books and humanity, great deeds, and the great questions of the day,
were the staple of her conversation. Religion, too, was an ever present
topic. She was one of the most religious women of her day, and she
interwove it in all her conversation, as she did in her writings.
Indeed, her religion was a part of herself, and whoever knew her must
know of this strong, deep feeling. One cannot conceive of Mrs. Browning
apart from her religion. She would not have been herself, but another.
It was a rare sight, indeed, to see this frail, spiritual-looking woman,
when she talked upon some phase of her favorite theme, with her great
expressive eyes fairly glowing with the intensity of her feeling, and a
light shining through her face, as from the soul beyond. Her other great
theme was Italy, and upon this she was always eloquent. Indeed, both Mr.
and Mrs. Browning may almost be said to have adopted Italy for their
home, and to have transferred their home affections to her soil. Many
great Englishmen have loved Italy, but none more warmly than the
Brownings. They suffered with her through all those dark hours which
preceded her final emancipation from the foreign yoke, and they aided by
their strong, brave words in bringing about that emancipation. Their
pens were used in her behalf, perhaps too much for their own fame,
because many of the subjects on which they wrote were of somewhat
transient interest and more political than poetical. They were both
friends and helpers to the great statesman Cavour in all his labors for
the reconstruction of Italy, and one of the deepest interests of their
lives was that reconstruction. Mrs. Browning's frail health was really
injured at times by the serious grief she felt for temporary reverses,
and by the absorbing interest she took in the cause.
The dream of her life, a free and united Italy, was fulfilled in
Napoleon's formal recognition of Italian freedom and unity, the very
week she died. It is given to few in this world thus to see the fruition
of their fondest desires, and to pass away just as the clear morning
light is dispelling the shadows of a long night of watching and waiting.
The Napoleonic poems added nothing to her reputation as a poet, and were
much regretted by some of her friends; but her literary reputation was
nothing to her compared with her love for Italy, and she at least had
faith in Napoleon's promises.
Mr. Hilliard, in his "Six Months in Italy," says of the home behind the
Casa Guidi windows:--
"A happier home and a more perfect union than theirs it is not easy
to imagine; and this completeness arises not only from the rare
qualities which each possesses, but from their perfect adaptation
to each other. . . . As he is full of manly power, so she is a type
of the most sensitive and delicate womanhood. . . . I have never
seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a
celestial and immortal spirit. She is a soul of fire enclosed in a
shell of pearl. . . . Nor is she more remarkable for genius and
learning than for sweetness of temper, tenderness of heart, depth
of feeling, and purity of spirit. It is a privilege to know such
beings singly and separately; but to see their powers quickened and
their happiness rounded by the sacred tie of marriage, is a cause
for peculiar and lasting gratitude."
The boy Browning was very beautiful in his childhood, and occupied a
large place in the lives of his parents, who felt great pride in showing
him to their visitors. It is a pleasant story told of the street beggars
who walked through the Via Maggio in those days, under the windows of
Casa Guidi, that they always spoke of Mrs. Browning, simply and
touchingly, as "the mother of the beautiful child." But her love for
this one beautiful darling taught her the whole possibility of
motherhood. It made her heart go out in deepest sympathy to all mothers,
as "to the friends unknown, and a land unvisited over the sea," to whom
she writes:--
"Shall I speak like a poet, or run
Into weak woman's tears for relief?
Ah, children! I never lost one,--
Yet my arm's round my own little son,
And love knows the secret of grief."
In the Italian poem "Mother and Poet," she has expressed a mother's
feelings as truthfully and vividly as any writer who has ever touched
that great theme. She can describe, too, in language that almost
blisters the page on which it is written, that other class of mothers
which it is bitter to feel that the earth does contain,--the monsters
who would sell their daughters for gold. In that most powerful story of
Marian in "Aurora Leigh," she writes thus:--
"The child turned round
And looked up piteous in the mother's face
(Be sure that mother's death-bed will not want
Another devil to damn, than such a look).
'Oh, mother!' then with desperate glance to heaven,
'God free me from my mother,' she shrieked out,
'These mothers are too dreadful.' And with force
As passionate as fear, she tore her hands,
Like lilies from the rocks, from hers and his,
And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep,
Away from both, away if possible,
As far as God--away. They yelled at her
As famished hounds at a hare,
She heard them yell,
And felt her name hiss after her from the hills
Like shot from guns."
The whole of that wonderful poem of "Aurora Leigh" is full of such
impassioned sympathy with womanhood, and shows the great heart of the
poet as perhaps none of her other poems do. Written in the maturity of
her powers, and after she had learned much of life in all its intricate
depths, it contains perhaps more passion and power and fiery-burning
eloquence than any other poem in the English language. Only an inspired
womanly hand, which had sounded all the deeps of the world's scanty
wisdom, could have penned it.
But Mrs. Browning shows great wealth of human sympathy in all her poems.
Oppression and wrong sink into the very depths of her nature, and she
cannot bear that they shall go unreproved in the universe while she
exists. Her sympathy with our labors for the emancipation of the slaves
was well known, in a time when little sympathy was to be found among the
English, and her feeling for the poor and oppressed of her native land
was always deep and strong. Her "Cry of the Children" will never be
forgotten while there are suffering children in the world, and while
there are human hearts to listen to their wail. It is as sacred a piece
of inspiration as the Psalms of David; and the need for such an
expression of the woe of the outcast poor of England is almost as great
to-day as when the immortal poem was written. Still can we ask of the
English people:--
"Do you hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their heads against their mothers,
And that cannot stop tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;
The young birds are chirping in their nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young flowers are blowing toward the west.
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly;
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free."
This poem, Hood's "Song of the Shirt," and a few others, have added
their mite to the influence of Dickens in benefiting a little the
poorest of England's poor; yet how much remains to be done is shown in
the present deplorable condition of the lower orders in that country.
What might not such a poet as Robert Browning have done, could he have
emancipated himself from his involved and difficult style, and written
in a manly and straightforward way of the world of men and women around
him, instead of going off in his exasperating manner into the Red Cotton
Night-Cap Country, to tell us of Prince Hohenstiel Tebwangan Saviour of
Society. The pity of it is beyond expression, when so great a poet as
Browning makes himself so needlessly unintelligible, and loses the vast
influence he might exert over the minds of his generation and the minds
of posterity. But the thoughts hidden in his rugged verse are worth
delving for, and already societies are being formed in England and
America to study them. These societies will do something to popularize
him, but he can never be made what he was really capable of being, the
poet of the people. His circle of readers will always be small, but it
will be of the world's best. The thinkers will never make a vast throng
in this world, while the highways of folly will always swarm with a
great multitude which no man can number. But there is a day after
to-day, and sometime, when the thought of the world shall have risen to
a higher level, the name of Robert Browning will be oftener than now
upon the lips of men.
Personally, Browning is almost unknown to his countrymen; his name even
has never been heard by the multitude. He is never pointed out to
strangers, as are other men of letters, and never attracts any notice in
a public place. But he is well known to a select circle, where he is a
favorite, and he goes a good deal into society in London these later
years. He is a great favorite with women everywhere; and he deserves to
be, for he has always shown himself capable of sympathizing with what is
truest and best in womanhood. He has been loyal to the memory of his
wife during all his long years of solitude, and it still seems that she
holds her old place in his heart. He is now seventy-four years old,--a
fine, well-preserved man, with a light step and an easy carriage. He was
a handsome man in his prime, with a charmingly expressive face and a
good figure. His hair is now snow-white, but otherwise he is not old in
his looks. His manners are somewhat precise, and after the old school.
He is fond of admiration, and is accounted egotistical, although
reserved in general society. His talk, like his writings, is a good deal
upon out-of-the-way subjects, and is often deemed unintelligible by
those unfamiliar with his thought. To his enthusiastic admirers it seems
like inspiration. He is still busy with his pen, although his volumes of
poetry now number twenty or more. He has really created a literature of
his own. How life appears to him now, from the vantage-ground of his
almost fourscore years, it would be interesting to know. Many years ago
he wrote, a little wearily:--
"There's a fancy some lean to and others hate,--
That when this life is ended begins
New work for the soul in another state,
Where it strives and gets weary, loses and wins,--
Where the strong and the weak this world's congeries
Repeat in large what they practised in small,
Through life after life in an infinite series,--
Only the scale's to be changed, that's all.
"Yet I hardly know. When a soul has seen
By the means of Evil that Good is best,
And through earth and its noise what is heaven's serene,--
When its faith in the same has stood the test,--
Why, the child grown man, we burn the rod;
The uses of labor are surely done.
There remaineth a rest for the people of God,
And I have had troubles enough for one."
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