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THE BROWNINGS
THEIR LIFE AND ART

ROBERT BROWNING
From a drawing made by Field Talfourd, in Rome, 1855

THE BROWNINGS
THEIR LIFE AND ART

BY

LILIAN WHITING

AUTHOR OF “THE WORLD BEAUTIFUL,”
“ITALY THE MAGIC LAND,”
“THE SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE,” ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1911

Copyright, 1911,
By Little, Brown, and Company.
All rights reserved
Published, October, 1911

Printers
S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, U.S.A.

INSCRIBED TO
ROBERT BARRETT BROWNING
(CAVALIERE DELLA CORONA D’ITALIA)
PAINTER, SCULPTOR, CONNOISSEUR IN ART
WITH ENCHANTING REMEMBRANCES OF HOURS IN “LA TORRE
ALL’ ANTELLA” AND THE FAITHFUL REGARDS OF
LILIAN WHITING
Florence, Italy,
June, 1911

FOREWORD

The present volume was initiated in Florence, and, from its first inception, invested with the cordial assent and the sympathetic encouragement of Robert Barrett Browning. One never-to-be-forgotten day, all ethereal light and loveliness, has left its picture in memory, when, in company with Mr. Browning and his life-long friend, the Marchesa Peruzzi di’ Medici (náta Story), the writer of this biography strolled with them under the host’s orange trees and among the riotous roses of his Florentine villa, “La Torre All’ Antella,” listening to their sparkling conversation, replete with fascinating reminiscences. To Mr. Browning the tribute of thanks, whose full scope is known to the Recording Angel alone, is here offered; and there is the blending of both privilege and duty in grateful acknowledgements to Messrs. Smith, Elder, & Company for their courtesy in permitting the somewhat liberal drawing on their published Letters of both the Brownings, on which reliance had to be based in any effort to

“Call up the buried Past again,”

and construct the story, from season to season, so far as might be, of that wonderful interlude of the wedded life of the poets.

Yet any formality of thanks to this house is almost lost sight of in the rush of memories of that long and mutually-trusting friendship between the late George Murray Smith, the former head of this firm, and Robert Browning, a friendship which was one of the choicest treasures in both their lives.

To The Macmillan Company, the publishers for both the first and the present Lord Tennyson; To Houghton Mifflin Company; to Messrs. Dodd, Mead, & Company; to The Cornhill Magazine (to which the writer is indebted for some data regarding Browning and Professor Masson); to each and all, acknowledgments are offered for their courtesy which has invested with added charm a work than which none was ever more completely a labor of love.

To Edith, Contessa Rucellai (náta Bronson), whose characteristically lovely kindness placed at the disposal of this volume a number of letters written by Robert Browning to her mother, Mrs. Arthur Bronson, special gratitude is offered.

“Poetry,” said Mrs. Browning, “is its own exceeding great reward.” Any effort, however remote its results from the ideal that haunted the writer, to interpret the lives of such transcendent genius and nobleness as those of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, must also be its own exceeding reward in leading to a passion of pursuit of all that is highest and holiest in the life that now is, and in that which is to come.

LILIAN WHITING

The Brunswick, Boston
Midsummer Days, 1911

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE BROWNINGS
THEIR LIFE AND ART

CHAPTER I

1812-1833

The Most Exquisite Romance of Modern Life—Ancestry and Youth of Robert Browning—Love of Music—Formative Influences—The Fascination of Byron—A Home “Crammed with Books”—The Spell of Shelley—“Incondita”—Poetic Vocation Definitely Chosen—“Pauline.”

Such a very page de Contes is the life of the wedded poets, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that it is difficult to realize that this immortal idyl of Poetry, Genius, and Love was less than fifteen years in duration, out of his seventy-seven, and her fifty-five years of life. It is a story that has touched the entire world

“... with mystic gleams,
Like fragments of forgotten dreams,”

this story of beautiful associations and friendships, of artistic creation, and of the entrance on a wonderful realm of inspiration and loveliness. At the time of their marriage he was in his thirty-fifth, and she in her forty-first year, although she is described as looking so youthful that she was like a girl, in her slender, flower-like grace; and he lived on for twenty-eight years after

“Clouds and darkness
Fell upon Camelot,”

with the death of his “Lyric Love.” The story of the most beautiful romance that the world has ever known thus falls into three distinctive periods,—that of the separate life of each up to the time of their marriage; their married life, with its scenic setting in the enchantment of Italy; and his life after her withdrawal from earthly scenes. The story is also of duplex texture; for the outer life, rich in associations, travel, impressions, is but the visible side of the life of great creative art. A delightful journey is made, but its record is not limited to the enjoyment of friends and place; a poem is written whose charm and power persist through all the years.

Busts of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Made in 1861 by William Wetmore Story

No adequate word could be written of the Brownings that did not take account of this twofold life of the poets. It is almost unprecedented that the power and resplendence and beauty of the life of art should find, in the temporal environment, so eminent a correspondence of beauty as it did with Robert and Elizabeth Browning. Not that they were in any wise exempt from sorrow and pain; the poet, least of all, would choose to be translated, even if he might, to some enchanted region remote from all the mingled experiences of humanity; it is the common lot of destiny, with its prismatic blending of failure and success, of purpose and achievement, of hope and defeat, of love and sorrow, out of which the poet draws his song. He would not choose

“That jar of violet wine set in the air,
That palest rose sweet in the night of life,”

to the exclusion of the common experiences of the day.

“Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the darksome hours
Weeping, and watching for the morrow,
He knows you not, ye unseen Powers.”

But to those who, poets or otherwise, see life somewhat in the true proportion of its lasting relations, events are largely transmuted into experiences, and are realized in their extended relations. The destiny of the Brownings led them into constantly picturesque surroundings; and the force and manliness of his nature, the tender sweetness and playful loveliness of hers, combined with their vast intellectual range, their mutual genius for friendships, their devotion to each other and to their son, their reverence for their art, and their lofty and noble spirituality of nature,—all united to produce this exquisite and unrivaled romance of life,—

“A Beauty passing the earth’s store.”

The rapture of the poet’s dream pervaded every experience.

“O Life, O Poetry,
Which means life in life.”

The transmutation of each into the other, both Life and Poetry, as revealed in their lives, is something as exceptional as it is beautiful in the world’s history.

It is only to those who live for something higher than merely personal ends, that the highest happiness can come; and the aim of these wedded poets may well be read in the lines from “Aurora Leigh”:

“... Beloved, let us love so well,
Our work shall still be better for our love,
And still our love be sweeter for our work,
And both commended, for the sake of each,
By all true workers and true lovers born.”

In the ancestry of Robert Browning there was nothing especially distinctive, although it is representative of the best order of people; of eminently reputable life, of moderate means, of culture, and of assured intelligence. It is to the Brownings of Dorsetshire, who were large manor-owners in the time of Henry VII, that the poet’s family is traced. Robert Browning, the grandfather of the poet, was a clerk in the Bank of England, a position he obtained through the influence of the Earl of Shaftesbury. Entering on this work at the age of twenty, he served honorably for fifty years, and was promoted to the position of the Bank Stock office, a highly responsible place, that brought him in constant contact with the leading financiers of the day. Born in 1749, he had married, in 1778, Margaret Tittle, the inheritor of some property in the West Indies, where she was born of English parentage. The second Robert, the father of the poet, was the son of this union. In his early youth he was sent out to take charge of his mother’s property, and his grandson, Robert Barrett Browning, relates with pardonable pride how he resigned the post, which was a lucrative one, because he could not tolerate the system of slave labor prevailing there. By this act he forfeited all the estate designed for him, and returned to England to face privation and to make his own way. He, too, became a clerk in the Bank of England, and in 1811, at the age of thirty, married Sarah Anna Wiedemann, the daughter of a ship-owner in Dundee. Mr. Wiedemann was a German of Hamburg, who had married a Scotch lady; and thus, on his maternal side, the poet had mingled Scotch and German ancestry. The new household established itself in Southampton Street, Camberwell, and there were born their two children, Robert, on May 7, 1812, and on January 7, 1814, Sarah Anna, who came to be known as Sarianna through all her later life.

The poet’s father was not only an efficient financier, but he was also a man of scholarly culture and literary tastes. He was a lover of the classics, and was said to have known by heart the first book of the Iliad, and the Odes of Horace. There is a legend that he often soothed his little son to sleep by humming to him an ode of Anacreon. He wrote verse, he was a very clever draughtsman, and he was a collector of rare books and prints. Mr. W. J. Stillman, in his “Autobiography of a Journalist,” refers to the elder Browning, whom he knew in his later years, as “a serene, untroubled soul,... as gentle as a gentle woman, a man to whom, it seemed to me, no moral conflict could ever have arisen to cloud his frank acceptance of life as he found it come to him.... His unworldliness had not a flaw.” In Browning’s poem entitled “Development” (in “Asolando”) he gives this picture of his father and of his own childhood:

“My Father was a scholar and knew Greek.
When I was five years old, I asked him once
‘What do you read about?’
‘The siege of Troy.’
‘What is a siege, and what is Troy?’
Whereat
He piled up chairs and tables for a town,
Set me a-top for Priam, called our cat
—Helen, enticed away from home (he said)
By wicked Paris, who couched somewhere close
Under the footstool....
········
This taught me who was who and what was what;
So far I rightly understood the case
At five years old; a huge delight it proved
And still proves—thanks to that instructor sage
My Father....”

The poet’s mother was a true gentlewoman, characterized by fervent religious feeling, delicacy of perception, and a great love for music. She was reared in the Scottish kirk, and her husband in the Church of England, but they both connected themselves after their marriage with an “Independent” body that held their meetings in York Street, where the Robert Browning Hall now stands. They were, however, greatly attached to the Rev. Henry Melvill (later Canon at St. Paul’s), whose evening service they habitually attended. While the poet’s mother had little training in music, she was a natural musician, and was blessed with that keen, tremulous susceptibility to musical influence that was so marked a trait in her son. William Sharp pictures a late afternoon, when, playing softly to herself in the twilight, she was startled to hear a sound in the room. “Glancing around, she beheld a little white figure distinctly outlined against an oak bookcase, and could just discern two large wistful eyes looking earnestly at her. The next moment the child had sprung into her arms, sobbing passionately at he knew not what, but, as his paroxysm of emotion subsided, whispering over and over,‘Play! Play!’”

The elder Browning was an impassioned lover of medieval legend and story. He was deeply familiar with Paracelsus, with Faust, and with many of the Talmudic tales. His library was large and richly stored,—the house, indeed, “crammed with books,” in which the boy browsed about at his own will. It was the best of all possible educations, this atmosphere of books. And the wealth of old engravings and prints fascinated the child. He would sit among these before a glowing fire, while from the adjoining room floated strains “of a wild Gaelic lament, with its insistent falling cadences.” It is recorded as his mother’s chief happiness,—“her hour of darkness and solitude and music.” Of such fabric are poetic impressions woven. The atmosphere was what Emerson called the “immortal ichor.” The boy was companioned by the “liberating gods.” Something mystic and beautiful beckoned to him, and incantations, unheard by the outer sense, thronged about him, pervading the air. The lad began to recast in English verse the Odes of Horace. From his school, on holiday afternoons, he sought a lonely spot, elm-shaded, where he could dimly discern London in the distance, with the gleam of sunshine on the golden cross of St. Paul’s,—lying for hours on the grass whence, perchance, he

“Saw distant gates of Eden gleam
And did not dream it was a dream.”

Meantime the boy read Junius, Voltaire, Walpole’s Letters, the “Emblems” of Quarles (a book that remained as a haunting influence all his life), and Mandeville’s “Fable of the Bees.” The first book of his own purchase was a copy of Ossian’s poems, and his initial effort in literary creation was in likeness of the picturesque imaginations that appealed with peculiar fascination to his mind.

“The world of books is still the world,” wrote Mrs. Browning in “Aurora Leigh,” and this was the world of Robert Browning’s early life. The genesis of many of his greatest poems can be traced directly to this atmosphere of books, and their constant use and reference in his childhood. Literature and life, are, indeed, so absolutely interpenetrated and so interdependent that they can almost invariably be contemplated as cause and effect, each reacting upon the other in determining sequences. By the magic of some spiritual alchemy, reading is transmuted into the qualities that build up character, and these qualities, in turn, determine the continued choice of books, so that selection and result perpetuate themselves, forming an unceasing contribution to the nature of life. If with these qualities is united the kindling imagination, the gift that makes its possessor the creative artist, the environment of books and perpetual reference to them act as a torch that ignites the divine fire. Browning’s early stimulus owes much, not only to the book-loving father, but to his father’s brother, his uncle Reuben Browning, who was a classical scholar and who took great interest in the boy. Preserved to the end of the poet’s life was a copy of the Odes of Horace, in translation, given to him as a lad of twelve, with his uncle’s autograph inscription on the fly-leaf. This was the translation made by Christopher Smart, whose “Song of David” soon became one of the boy’s favorites, and it is curious to trace how, more than sixty years later, Browning embodied Smart in his “Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day,” as one with whom

“... truth found vent
In words for once with you....”

Browning, with the poet’s instant insight, read the essential story of his boyhood into the lines:

“... Dreaming, blindfold led
By visionary hand, did soul’s advance
Precede my body’s, gain inheritance
Of fact by fancy...?”

No transcription of the poet’s childhood could even suggest the fortunate influences surrounding him that did not emphasize the rare culture and original power of his father. The elder Browning was familiar with old French and with both Spanish and Italian literature. “His wonderful store of information might really be compared to an inexhaustible mine,” said one who knew him well.

It is easy to see how out of such an atmosphere the future poet drew unconsciously the power to weave his “magic web” of such poems as the “Parleyings,” “Abt Vogler,” “Ferishtah’s Fancies,” and was lured on into that realm of marvelous creation out of which sprang his transcendent masterpiece, “The Ring and the Book.”

The elder Browning’s impassioned love of books was instanced by the curious fact that he could go in the dark to his library, and out of many hundreds of volumes select some particular one to which conversational reference had incidentally been made regarding some point which he wished to verify. He haunted all the old book-stalls in London, and knew their contents better than did their owners.

Books are so intimately associated with the very springs of both character and achievement that no adequate idea of the formative influences of the life and poetry of Robert Browning could be gained without familiarity with this most determining and conspicuous influence of his boyhood. The book with which a man has lived becomes an essential factor in his growth. “None of us yet know,” said Ruskin, “for none of us have yet been taught in early youth, what fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought, proof against all adversity, bright fancies, satisfied memories, noble histories, faithful sayings, treasure-houses of precious and restful thoughts,... houses built without hands for our souls to live in.” These houses for the soul, built in thought, will be transposed into outer form and semblance.

There is a nebulous but none the less pernicious tradition that great literature is formidable, and presents itself as a task rather than as a privilege to the reader. Devotion to the best books has been regarded as something of a test of mental endurance, for which the recompense, if not the antidote, must be sought in periods of indulgence in the frivolous and the sensational. Never was there a more fatal misconception. It is the inconsequential, the crude, the obtuse, that are dull in literature, as in life; and stupidity in various languages might well be entitled to rank among the Seven Deadly Sins of Dante. Even in the greatest literature there is much that the child may easily learn to appreciate and to love.

“Great the Master
And sweet the Magic”

that opens the golden door of literary stimulus. Books are to the mind as is food to the body. Emerson declares that the poet is the only teller of news, and Mrs. Browning pronounced poets as

“The only truth-tellers now left to God.”

Familiarity with noble thought and beautiful expression influences the subconscious nature to an incalculable degree, and leads “the spirit finely touched” on “to all fine issues.”

Browning lived in this stimulating atmosphere. He warmed his hands at the divine fire; and the fact that all this richness of resource stimulated rather than stifled him is greatly to the credit of his real power. Favorable surroundings and circumstances did not serve him as a cushion on which to go to sleep, but rather as the pedestal on which he might climb to loftier altitudes. It was no lotus-eating experience into which the lad was lulled, but the vital activity of the life of creative thought. The Heavenly Powers are not invariably, even if frequently, sought in sorrow only, and in the mournful midnight hours. There are natures that grow by affluence as well as by privation, and that develop their best powers in sunshine.

“Even in a palace life can be well lived,” said Marcus Aurelius. The spirit formed to dwell in the starry spaces is not allured to the mere enjoyment of the senses, even when material comfort and intellectual luxuries may abound. Not that the modest abundance of the elder Browning’s books and pictures could take rank as intellectual luxury. It was stimulus, not satiety, that these suggested.

Pictures and painters had their part, too, in the unconscious culture that surrounded the future poet. London in that day afforded little of what would be called art; the National Gallery was not opened until Browning was in his young manhood; the Tate and other modern galleries were then undreamed of. But, to the appropriating temperament, one picture may do more than a city full of galleries might for another, and to the small collection of some three or four hundred paintings in the Dulwich Gallery, Browning was indebted for great enjoyment, and for the art that fostered his sympathetic appreciation. In after years he referred to his gratitude for being allowed its privileges when under the age (fourteen) at which these were supposed to be granted. Small as was the collection, it was representative of the Italian and Spanish, the French and the Dutch schools, as well as of the English, and the boy would fix on some one picture and sit before it for an hour, lost in its suggestion. It was the more imaginative art that enchained him. In later years, speaking of these experiences in a letter to Miss Barrett, he wrote of his ecstatic contemplation of “those two Guidos, the wonderful Rembrandt’s ‘Jacob’s Vision,’ such a Watteau....” An old engraving from Correggio, in his father’s home, was one of the sources of inspiration of Browning’s boyhood. The story fascinated him; he never tired of asking his father to repeat it, and something of its truth so penetrated into his consciousness that in later years he had the old print hung in his room that it might be before him as he wrote. It became to him, perhaps, one of

“the unshaped images that lie
Within my mind’s cave.”

The profound significance of the picture evidently haunted him, as is made evident by a passage in “Pauline” that opens:

“But I must never grieve whom wing can waft
Far from such thoughts—as now. Andromeda!
And she is with me; years roll, I shall change,
But change can touch her not—so beautiful
With her fixed eyes....”

Is there gained another glimpse of Browning’s boyhood in those lines in “Pauline”?:

“I am made up of an intensest life,
Of a most clear idea of consciousness
Of self, distinct from all its qualities,
From all affections, passions, feelings, powers.”

The various and complex impressions, influences, and shaping factors of destiny that any biographer discerns in the formative years of his subject are as indecipherable as a palimpsest, and as little to be classified as the contents of Pandora’s box; nor is it on record that the man himself can look into his own history and rightly appraise the relative values of these. Nothing, certainly, could be more remote from the truth than the reading of autobiographic significance into any stray line a poet may write; for imagination is frequently more real than reality. Yet many of the creations of after life may trace their germination to some incident or impression. William Sharp offers a beautiful and interesting instance of one of these when he ascribes the entrancing fantasy of “The Flight of the Duchess” to a suggestion made on the poet’s mind as a child on a Guy Fawkes day, when he followed across the fields a woman singing a strange song, whose refrain was: “Following the Queen of the Gypsies, O!” The haunting line took root in his memory and found its inflorescence in that memorable poem.

It was not conducive to poetic fancy when the lad was placed in the school of a Mr. Ready, at Peckham, where he solaced himself for the rules and regulations which he abhorred by writing little plays, and persuading his school-fellows to act in them with him.

Browning’s first excursion into Shelley’s poems, brought home to him one night as a gift from his mother, was in one of the enchanting evenings of May; where, at the open window by which he sat, there floated in the melody of two nightingales, one in a laburnum, “heavy with its weight of gold,” and the other in a copper-beech, at the opposite side of the garden. Such an hour mirrors itself unconsciously in a poet’s memory, and affords, in future years, “such stuff as dreams are made of.”

Byron, who, as Mazzini says, “led the genius of Britain on a pilgrimage throughout all Europe,” stamped an impress upon the youthful Browning that may be traced throughout his entire life. There was something in the genius of Byron that acted as an enormous force on the nature in response to it, that transformed nebulous and floating ideals and imaginings into hope and resolution, that burned away barriers and revealed truth. By its very nature influence is determined as much by the receiver as by the inspirer, and if a light is applied to a torch, the torch, too, must be prepared to ignite, or there will be no blaze.

“A deft musician does the breeze become
Whenever an Æolian harp it finds;
Hornpipe and hurdygurdy both are dumb
Unto the most musicianly of winds.”

The fire of Byron, the spirituality of Shelley, illuminated that world of drift and dream in which Robert Browning dwelt; and while Shelley, with his finer spirit, his glorious, impassioned imagination,

“A creature of impetuous breath,”

incited poetic ardors and unmeasured rapture of vision, Byron penetrated his soul with a certain effective energy that awakened in him creative power. The spell of Shelley’s poetry acted upon Browning as a vision revealed of beauty and radiance. For Shelley himself, who, as Tennyson said, “did yet give the world another heart and new pulses,” Browning’s feeling was even more intense.

In the analysis of Shelley’s poetic nature Browning offers the critical reader a key to his own. He asserts that it is the presence of the highest faculty, even though less developed, that gives rank to nature, rather than a lower faculty more developed. Although it was in later years that the impression Shelley made upon his boyhood found adequate expression in his noted essay, the spell reflected itself in “Pauline,” and is to be distinctly traced in many of his poems throughout his entire life. He was aware from the first of that peculiarly kindling quality in Shelley, the flash of life in his work:

“He spurreth men, he quickeneth
To splendid strife.”

Under the title of “Incondita” was collected a group of the juvenile verses of Robert Browning, whose special claim to interest is in the revelation of the impress made upon the youth by Byron and Shelley.

Among the early friends of the youthful poet were Alfred Domett (the “Waring” of his future poem), and Joseph Arnould, who became a celebrated judge in India.

With Browning there was never any question about his definite vocation as a poet. “Pauline” was published in 1833, before he had reached his twenty-first birthday. Rejected by publishers, it was brought out at the expense of his aunt, Mrs. Silverthorne; and his father paid for the publication of “Paracelsus,” “Sordello,” and for the first eight parts of “Bells and Pomegranates.” On the appearance of “Pauline,” it was reviewed by Rev. William Johnson Fox, as the “work of a poet and a genius.” Allan Cunningham and other reviewers gave encouraging expressions. The design of “Pauline” is that spiritual drama to which Browning was always temperamentally drawn. It is supposed to be the confessions and reminiscences of a dying man, and while it is easy to discern its crudeness and inconsistencies, there are in it, too, many detached passages of absolute and permanent value. As this:

“Sun-treader, life and light be thine for ever!
Thou art gone from us; years go by and spring
Gladdens, and the young earth is beautiful,
Yet thy songs come not....”

Mr. Browning certainly gave hostages to poetic art when he produced “Pauline,” in which may be traced the same conceptions of life as those more fully and clearly presented in “Paracelsus” and “Sordello.” It embodies the conviction which is the very essence and vital center of all Browning’s work—that ultimate success is attained through partial failures. From first to last Browning regards life as an adventure of the soul, which sinks, falls, rises, recovers itself, relapses into faithlessness to its higher powers, yet sees the wrong and aims to retrieve it; gropes through darkness to light; and though “tried, troubled, tempted,” never yields to alien forces and ignominious failure. The soul, being divine, must achieve divinity at last. That is the crystallization of the message of Browning.

The poem “Pauline,” lightly as Mr. Browning himself seemed in after life to regard it, becomes of tremendous importance in the right approach to the comprehension of his future work. It reveals to us in what manner the youthful poet discerned “the Gleam.” Like Tennyson, he felt “the magic of Merlin,”—of that spirit of the poetic ideal that bade him follow.

“The Master whisper’d
‘Follow The Gleam.’”

And what unguessed sweetness and beauty of life and love awaited the poet in the unfolding years!

CHAPTER II

1806-1832

Childhood and Early Youth of Elizabeth Barrett—Hope End—“Summer Snow of Apple-blossoms”—Her Bower of White Roses—“Living with Visions”—The Malvern Hills—Hugh Stuart Boyd—Love of Learning—“Juvenilia”—Impassioned Devotion To Poetry.

The literature of childhood presents nothing more beautiful than the records of the early years of Elizabeth Barrett. Fragmentary though they be, yet, gathered here and there, they fall into a certain consecutive unity, from which one may construct a mosaic-like picture of the daily life of the little girl who was born on March 6, 1806, in Coxhoe Hall, Durham, whence the family soon removed to Hope End, a home of stately beauty and modest luxury. There were brothers to the number of eight; and two sisters, Henrietta and Arabel, all younger than herself. Edward, the eldest son, especially cared for Elizabeth, holding her in tender and almost reverential love, and divining, almost from his infancy, her exquisite gifts. Apparently, the eldest sister was also greatly beloved by the whole troop of the younger brothers,—Charles, Samuel, George, Henry, Alfred, and the two younger, who were named Septimus and Octavius.

With three daughters and eight sons, the household did not lack in merriment and overflowing life; and while the little Elizabeth was born to love books and dreams, and assimilated learning as naturally as she played with her dolls, she was no prodigy, set apart because of fantastic qualities, but an eager, earnest little maid, who, although she read Homer at eight years of age, yet read him with her doll clasped closely in one hand, and who wrote her childish rhymes as unconsciously as a bird sings. It is a curious coincidence that this love of the Greeks, as to history, literature, and mythology, characterized the earliest childhood of both Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Pope’s Homer was the childish favorite of each. “The Greeks were my demigods,” she herself said, in later life, of her early years, “and haunted me out of Pope’s Homer, until I dreamt more of Agamemnon than of Moses the black pony.”

The house at Hope End has been described by Lady Carmichael as “a luxurious home standing in a lovely park, among trees and sloping hills,” and the earliest account that has been preserved of the little girl reveals her sitting on a hassock, propped against the wall, in a lofty room called “Elizabeth’s chamber,” with a stained glass oriel window through which golden gleams of light fell, lingering on the long curls that drooped over her face as she sat absorbed in a book. She was also an eager worker in her garden, the children all being given a plot to cultivate for themselves, and Elizabeth won special fame for her bower of white roses.

There are few data about the parents of Elizabeth Barrett, and the legal name, Moulton-Barrett, by which she signed her marriage register and by which her father is commonly known, has been a source of some confused statements. Her father, Edward Barrett Moulton, came into an inheritance of property by which he was required to add the name of Barrett again, hyphenating it, and was thus known as Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett. He married Mary Graham Clarke, a native of Newcastle-on-the-Tyne, a woman of gentle loveliness, who died on October 1, 1828. Mr. Moulton-Barrett lived until 1860, his death occurring only a year before that of his famous daughter, who was christened Elizabeth Barrett Moulton, and who thus became, after her father’s added name, Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett, although, except when a legal signature was necessary, she signed her name as Elizabeth Barrett. The family are still known by the hyphenated name; and Mrs. Browning’s namesake niece, a very scholarly and charming young woman, now living in Rome, is known as Elizabeth Moulton-Barrett. She is the daughter of Mrs. Browning’s youngest brother, Alfred, and her mother, who is still living, is the original of Mrs. Browning’s poem, “A Portrait.” While Miss Moulton-Barrett never saw her aunt (having been born after her death), she is said to resemble Mrs. Browning both in temperament and character. By a curious coincidence the Barrett family, like the Brownings, had been for generations the owners of estates in the West Indies, and it is said that Elizabeth Barrett was the first child of their family to be born in England for more than a hundred years.

Her father, though born in Jamaica, was brought to England as a young child, and he was the ward of Chief Baron Lord Abinger. He was sent to Harrow, and afterwards to Cambridge, but he did not wait to finish his university course, and married when young. One of his sisters was painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and this portrait is now in the possession of Octavius Moulton-Barrett, Esq., of the Isle of Wight.

Elizabeth’s brother Edward was but two years her junior. It was he who was drowned at Torquay, almost before her eyes, and who is commemorated in her “De Profundis.” Of the other brothers only three lived to manhood. When Elizabeth was three years of age, the family removed to Hope End in Herefordshire, a spacious and stately house with domes and minarets embowered in a grove of ancient oaks. It was a place calculated to appeal to the imagination of a child, and in later years she wrote of it:

“Green the land is where my daily
Steps in jocund childhood played,
Dimpled close with hill and valley,
Dappled very close with shade,—
Summer-snow of apple-blossoms,
Running up from glade to glade.”

Here all her girlhood was passed, and it was in the garden of Hope End that she stood, holding up an apron filled with flowers, when that lovely picture was painted representing her as a little girl of nine or ten years of age. Much of rather apochryphal myth and error has grown up about Mrs. Browning’s early life. However gifted, she was in no wise abnormal, and she galloped on Moses, her black pony, through the Herefordshire lanes, and offered pagan sacrifices to some imaginary Athene, “with a bundle of sticks from the kitchen fire and a match begged from an indulgent housemaid.” In a letter to Richard Hengist Home, under date of October 5, 1843, in reply to a request of his for data for a biographical sketch of her for “The New Spirit of the Age,” she wrote:

“... And then as to stories, mine 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 of age, 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.”

When she was eleven or twelve, she amused herself by writing a great epic in four books, called “The Battle of Marathon,” which possessed her fancy. Her father took great pride in this, and, “bent upon spoiling me,” she laughingly said in later years, had fifty copies of this childish achievement printed, and there is one in the British Museum library to-day. No creator of prose romance could invent more curious coincidences than those of the similar trend of fancy that is seen between the childhood of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett. Her “Battle of Marathon” revealed how the Greek stories enchanted her fancy, and how sensitive was her ear in the imitation of the rhythm caught from Pope. This led her to the delighted study of Greek, that she might read its records at first hand; and Greek drew her into Latin, and from this atmosphere of classic lore, which, after all, is just as interesting to the average child as is the (too usual) juvenile pabulum, she drew her interest in thought and dream. The idyllic solitude in which she lived fostered all these mental excursions. “I had my fits of Pope and Byron and Coleridge,” she has related, “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.... Do you know the Malvern Hills? The Hills of Piers Plowman’s Visions? They seem to me my native hills. Beautiful, beautiful they were, and I lived among them till I had passed twenty by several years.”

Mr. Moulton-Barrett was one of the earliest of social reformers. So much has been said, and, alas! with too much justice, it must be conceded, of his eccentric tyranny, his monomania,—for it amounted to that, in relation to the marriage of any of his children regarding which his refusal was insanely irrational,—that it is pleasant to study him for a moment in his more normal life. In Ledbury, the nearest village, he would hold meetings for the untaught people, read and pray with them, and this at a period when for a man of wealth to concern himself in social betterment was almost unknown. He was truly “the friend of the unfriended poor,” and by his side, with wondering, upturned, childish eyes, was the little Elizabeth, an ardent and sympathetic companion. Until quite recently there were still living those who remembered Mr. Barrett as this intelligent and active helper; and in the parish church is a monument to him, by the side of a gloriously decorated tomb of the fourteenth century, with an inscription to his memory that vividly recalls the work of one who strove to revive the simple faith in God that has always, in all nations and in all centuries, met every real need of life.

Mrs. Barrett, a sweet and gentle woman, without special force of character, died when Elizabeth was but twenty years of age; and it was some five years before her mother’s death that Elizabeth met with the accident, from the fall from her saddle when trying to mount her pony, that caused her life-long delicacy of health. Her natural buoyancy of spirits, however, never failed, and she was endowed with a certain resistless energy which is quite at variance with the legendary traditions that she was a nervous invalid.

Hardly less than Browning in his earliest youth, was Elizabeth Barrett “full of an intensest life.” Her Italian master one day told her that there was an unpronounceable English word that expressed her exactly, but which, as he could not give in English, he would express in his own tongue,—testa lunga. Relating this to Mr. Browning in one of her letters, she says: “Of course the signor meant headlong!—and now I have had enough to tame me, and might be expected to stand still in my stall. But you see I do not. Headlong I was at first, and headlong I continue,—precipitately rushing forward through all manner of nettles and briers instead of keeping the path; guessing at the meaning of unknown words instead of looking into the dictionary,—tearing open letters, and never untying a string,—and expecting everything to be done in a minute, and the thunder to be as quick as the lightning.”

Impetuous, vivacious, with an inimitable sense of humor, full of impassioned vitality,—this was the real Elizabeth Barrett, whose characteristics were in no wise changed during her entire life. Always was she

“A creature of impetuous breath,”

full of vivacious surprises, and witty repartee.

Hope End was in the near vicinity of Eastnor Castle, a country seat of the Somersets; it is to-day one of the present homes of Lady Henry Somerset, and there are family records of long, sunny days that the young girl-poet passed at the castle, walking on the terraces that lead down to the still water, or lying idly in the boat as the ripples of the little lake lapped against the reeds and rushes that grew on the banks. In the castle library is preserved to-day an autograph copy of the first volume of Elizabeth Barrett’s poems, published when she was twenty, and containing that didactic “Essay on Mind” written when she was but seventeen, and of which she afterward said that it had “a pertness and a pedantry which did not even then belong to the character of the author,” and which she regretted, she went on to say, “even more than the literary defectiveness.” This volume was presented by her to a member of the Somerset family whose name is inscribed over that of her own signature.

During these years Hugh Stuart Boyd, the blind scholar, was living in Great Malvern, and one of Miss Barrett’s greatest pleasures was to visit and read Greek with him. He was never her “tutor,” in the literal sense, as has so widely been asserted, for her study of Greek was made with her brother Edward, under his tutor, a Mr. MacSweeney; but she read and talked of Greek literature (especially of the Christian poets) with him, and she loved to record her indebtedness to him “for many happy hours.” She wrote of him as one “enthusiastic for the good and the beautiful, and one of the most simple and upright of human beings.” The memory of her discussions with him is embalmed in her poem, “Wine of Cyprus,” which was addressed to him:

“And I think of those long mornings
Which my thought goes far to seek,
When, betwixt the folio’s turnings,
Solemn flowed the rhythmic Greek.”

Elizabeth Barrett was more than a student, however scholarly, of Greek. She had a temperamental affinity for the Greek poets, and such translations as hers of “Prometheus Bound” and Bion’s “Lament for Adonis,” identify her with the very life itself of Æschylus and Bion. In her essay on “The Greek Christian Poets” we find her saying: “We want the touch of Christ’s hand upon our literature, as it touched other dead things ... Something of a yearning after this may be seen among the Greek Christian poets,... religious poets of whom the universal church and the world’s literature would gladly embrace more names than can be counted to either.”

All her work of these early years is in that same delicate microscopic handwriting of her later life. She laughingly professed a theory that “an immense amount of physical energy must go to the making of those immense, sweeping hand-writings achieved by some persons.” She instanced that of Landor, “who writes as if he had the sky for a copy-book and dotted his i’s in proportion.”

Poetry as a serious art was the most earnest object in the life of Elizabeth Barrett. To her poetry meant “life in life.”

“Art’s a service,—mark.”

The poetic vocation could hardly be said to be so much a conscious and definite choice with her as a predetermined destiny, and still it was both. The possibility of not being a poet could never have occurred to her. There could have been as little question of Beethoven’s being other than a musician or of Raphael as being other than a painter. In poetry Elizabeth Barrett recognized the most potent form of service; and she held that poetic art existed for the sake of human co-operation with the Divine purposes.

The opening chapters of her life in the lovely seclusion of Hope End closed in 1832 with the removal of the family to Sidmouth in Devonshire. Here they were bestowed in a house which had been occupied by the Grand Duchess Helena. It commanded a splendid sea view, on which four drawing-room windows looked out, and there were green hills and trees behind. They met a few friends,—Sir John Kean, the Herrings,—and the town abounded in green lanes, “some of them quite black with foliage, where it is twilight in the middle of the day, and others letting in beautiful glimpses of the hills and the sunny sea.” Henrietta Barrett took long walks, Elizabeth accompanying her sister, mounted on her donkey. The brothers and sisters were all fond of boating and passed much time on the water. They would row as far as Dawlish, ten miles distant, and back; and after the five o’clock dinner there were not infrequently moonlight excursions on the sea. During these first months at Sidmouth Miss Barrett read Bulwer’s novels, which she asserts “quite delighted” her; as she found in them “all the dramatic talent which Scott has, and all the passion which he has not.” Bulwer seemed to her, also, “a far more profound discriminator of character” than Scott. She read Mrs. Trollope, “that maker of books,” whose work she characterized as not novels but “libels.” She found in Mrs. Trollope “neither the delicacy nor the candor which constitute true nobility of mind,” and thought that her talent formed but “a scanty veil to shadow her other defects.”

Miss Barrett grew to love Sidmouth, with its walks on the seashore; and letters, reading, poetic production, and family interests filled the time. Here, too, she found time to enter on a task dear to her, the translation of the “Prometheus Bound” of Æschylus.

Some years later, however, she entirely revised this early translation, of which she wrote to Hugh Stuart Boyd that it was “as cold as Caucasus, and flat as the neighboring plain,” and that “a palinodia, a recantation,” was necessary to her. In her preface to the later translation she begged that her reader would forgive her English for not being Greek, and herself for not being Æschylus.

CHAPTER III

1833-1841

Browning Visits Russia—“Paracelsus”—Recognition of Wordsworth and Landor—“Strafford”—First Visit to Italy—Mrs. Carlyle’s Baffled Reading of “Sordello”—Lofty Motif of the Poem—The Universal Problem of Life—Enthusiasm for Italy—The Sibylline Leaves Yet To Unfold.

From Camberwell to St. Petersburg was somewhat of a transition. This was Mr. Browning’s initial excursion into a wider world of realities, as distinguished from that mirage which rises in the world of dreams and mental nebulæ. “To know the universe itself as a road,—as many roads,” is the way in which the beckoning future prefigures itself to the artist temperament.

“All around him Patmos lies
Who hath spirit-gifted eyes.”

The eyes thus touched with the chrism of poetic art see the invisible which is peopled with forms unseen to others, and which offers a panorama of living drama. It is the poet who overhears the “talk of the gods,” and when he shall report

“Some random word they say,”

he becomes

“... the fated man of men
Whom the ages must obey.”

This was the undreamed destiny hovering over the young poet, luring him on like a guiding cloud which became a pillar of fire by night.

Among his London friends was the Chevalier George de Benkhausen, the Russian Consul-General, who, being suddenly summoned to Russia on some secret mission of state, invited Browning to accompany him. Browning went “nominally in the character of secretary,” Mrs. Orr says, and they fared forth on March 1, by steamer to Rotterdam, and then journeyed more than fifteen hundred miles by diligence, drawn by relays of galloping horses. The expedition was to Browning a rich mine of poetic material. The experience sank into the subconsciousness as seed to await fruition. In his “Ivan Ivanovitch,” where is seen

“This highway broad and straight e’en from the Neva’s mouth
To Moscow’s gates of gold,”

and in which the unending pine forests rising from the snow-covered ground are so vividly pictured; and in “Colombe’s Birthday,” where is seen the region of the heroine,—

“Castle Ravestein—
That sleeps out trustfully its extreme age
On the Meuse’ quiet bank, where she lived queen
Over the water-buds,...”

and the place

“... when he hid his child
Among the river-flowers at Ravestein,”

it can be seen how all this country impressed his imagination. Professor Hall Griffin finds in the fifth book of “Sordello” an unmistakable description of the most famous and oldest portrait of Charlemagne, which hangs in the Council Hall of the Rath-haus, in Aix, which Mr. Browning saw on this trip. During these three months he saw something of Russian society, and on the breaking up of the ice in the Neva in spring, witnessed the annual ceremony of the Czar’s drinking the first glass of water from it. Much of the gorgeous, barbaric splendor of Russian fairs and booths, “with droshkies and fish-pies” on the one hand, and stately palaces on the other, haunted him, and reflected themselves in several of his poems. Especially did the Russian music and strains of folk-song linger in his memory for all the after years.

On his return from Russia Browning had some fancy for entering on a diplomatic career, and was momentarily disappointed at not receiving an appointment to Persia, which he had in mind; fortunately for him and for the world he was held to the orbit of his poetic gift. Diplomacy has an abundance of recruits without devastating poetic genius to furnish them. The winter of 1834 found him deeply absorbed in “Paracelsus.” This poem is dedicated to the Marquis Amédée de Ripert-Monclar, who was a great friend of Browning at this time. The Marquis was four years his senior; he was in England as a private agent for the Duchesse de Berri and the Royalist party in France to the English government. The subject of the poem is said to have been suggested by the Marquis, although the fact that all this medieval lore had been familiar to Browning from his earliest childhood must be accounted the pre-determining factor in its creation. William Sharp quotes Browning as having once said of his father: “The old gentleman’s brain was a storehouse of literary and philosophical antiquities. He was completely versed in medieval legend, and seemed to have known Paracelsus, Faustus, and even Talmudic personages, personally,” and his son assimilated unconsciously this entire atmosphere.

Both “Paracelsus” and “Sordello” seem to spring, as by natural poetic evolution, from “Pauline”; all three of these poems are, in varying degree, a drama of the soul’s progress. They all suggest, and “Paracelsus,” especially, in a great degree embodies, the Hegelian philosophy; yet Mr. Barrett Browning expresses his rather positive conviction that his father never read Hegel at any period of his life. Dr. Corson regarded these early poems of Browning as of peculiar value in showing his attitude toward things. “We see in what direction the poet has set his face,” said Dr. Corson, “what his philosophy of life is, what soul-life means with him, what regeneration means, what edification means in its deepest sense of building up within us the spiritual temple.” Dr. Corson further illuminated this attitude of the poet by pointing out that he emphasized the approach to perfection as something that cannot be brought out through what is born and resides in the brain; but it must be by “the attracting power of magnetic personalities, the ultimate, absolute personality being the God-man, Christ. The human soul is regarded in Browning’s poetry,” continued Dr. Corson, “as a complexly organized, individualized, divine force, destined to gravitate toward the Infinite. How is this force with its numberless checks and counter-checks, its centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, best determined in its necessarily oblique way? How much earthly ballast must it carry to keep it sufficiently steady, and how little, that it may not be weighed down with materialistic heaviness?” Incredibly enough, in the revelations of the retrospective view, “Paracelsus” made little impression on the literary critics of the day; the Athenæum devoting to it less space even than to “the anonymous Pauline,” while the “Philip van Artevelde” of Henry Taylor (now hardly remembered) received fifteen columns of tribute, in which the critic confided to the public his enthusiastic estimate of that production. Neither Blackwood’s, the Quarterly, nor the Edinburgh even mentioned “Paracelsus”; the Athenæum admitted that it had talent, but admonished the poet that “Writers would do well to remember that though it is not difficult to imitate the mysticism and vagueness of Shelley, we love him—not because of these characteristics, but in spite of them.” The one gleam of consolation to the young poet in all this general neglect or unfavorable comment was that of a three-column article from the pen of John Forster in the Examiner, then conducted by Leigh Hunt, and on whose staff were Sergeant Talfourd and Proctor (Barry Cornwall) beside Forster, who was then a rising young journalist of twenty-three, only one month the senior of Browning. But Forster spoke with no uncertain note; rather, with authority, and in this critique he said:

“Since the publication of ‘Philip van Artevelde’ we have met with no such evidences of poetical genius ... and we may safely predict for its author a brilliant career, if he continues true to the present promise of his genius.”

The immediate effect of the publication of “Paracelsus” was of a social rather than of a literary character, for something in it seemed magnetic to the life of the day, and the young poet found himself welcomed by a brilliant literary circle. He met Wordsworth and Walter Savage Landor, Dickens, Monckton Milnes (later Lord Houghton), Proctor (Barry Cornwall), Horne, Sergeant Talfourd, Leigh Hunt, and others. Hunt was then domiciled in Cheyne Row, in close proximity to the Carlyles, with whom Browning had already formed a friendship.

Rev. William Johnson Fox, one of Browning’s earliest friends, was at this time living at Craven Hill, Bayswater, and on an evening when Macready had dined with him, Browning came in. This evening (November 27, 1835) is noted in Macready’s diary, and after speaking of Mr. Fox as an “original and profound thinker,” he adds:

“Mr. Robert Browning, the author of ‘Paracelsus,’ came in after dinner; I was very much pleased to meet him. His face is full of intelligence.... I took Mr. Browning on, and requested to be allowed to improve my acquaintance with him. He expressed himself warmly, as gratified by the proposal, wished to send me his book. We exchanged cards, and parted.”

Later (under date of December 7), Mr. Macready records:

“Read ‘Paracelsus,’ a work of great daring, starred with poetry of thought, feeling, diction, but occasionally obscure. The writer can scarcely fail to be a leading spirit of the time.”

On New Year’s Eve Mr. Macready invited a little house party, among whom were Forster and Browning. “Mr. Browning was very popular with the whole party,” writes Mr. Macready in his journal; “his simple and enthusiastic manner engaged attention and won golden opinions from all present; he looks and speaks more like a youthful poet than any man I ever saw.”

Browning’s personal appearance, “slim, and dark, and very handsome,” as Mary Cowden Clarke said, is pictured by many of his friends of that time. “As a young man,” writes William Sharp, “he seems to have had a certain ivory delicacy of coloring ... and he appeared taller than he really was, partly because of his rare grace of movement, and partly from a characteristic high poise of the head when listening intently to music or conversation.... His hair was so beautiful in its heavy sculpturesque waves as to attract frequent notice. Another, and more subtle personal charm, was his voice, then with a rare, flute-like tone, clear, sweet, and resonant.”

Macready was not only a notable figure on the stage at this period, but he was also (what every great actor must be) a man of thought, intense sensibility, and wide culture. Soon after Macready had appeared in Talfourd’s “Ion” (the première being on the playwright’s birthday), Talfourd gave a supper at his house, at which Browning for the first time met Wordsworth and Landor. Macready himself sat between these two illustrious poets, with Browning opposite to him. The guests included Ellen Tree, Miss Mitford, and Forster. Macready, recording this night in his diary, writes of “Wordsworth who pinned me.” Landor, it seems, talked of constructing drama, and said he “had not the faculty,” that he “could only set persons to talking; all the rest was chance.” But an ever remembered moment came for the young poet when the host proposed a toast to the author of “Paracelsus,” and Wordsworth, rising, said: “I am proud to drink to your health, Mr. Browning,” and Landor bowed with his inimitable, courteous grace, raising his glass to his lips. For some years, whenever Wordsworth visited London, Forster invited Browning to meet him. The younger poet was never an enthusiast in his mild friendship for the elder, although in after years (1875) he replied to a question by Rev. A. B. Grosart, the editor of Wordsworth’s works, that while in hasty youth he did “presume to use the great and venerated personality of Wordsworth as a sort of painter’s model,” he intended in “The Lost Leader” no portrait of the entire man. While Wordsworth’s political attitude did not please the young disciple of Shelley, for Landor he conceived the most profound admiration and sympathetic affection. It was a striking sequel to this youthful attraction that in Landor’s desolate old age it should be Browning who tenderly cared for him, and surrounded his last days with unfailing comfort and solicitude.

At this memorable supper, just as Browning was about to take his leave, Macready laid his hand on the young man’s shoulder, saying earnestly: “Write a play for me, and keep me from going to America.” The thought appealed to the poet, who replied: “Shall it be historical and English? What do you say to ‘Strafford’ for a subject?” Forster was then bringing out his biography of Strafford, on which Browning had assisted, so that the theme had already engaged his imagination. A few days after the supper Macready records in his diary receiving a note from Browning and adds: “What can I say upon it? It was a tribute which remunerated me for the annoyances and cares of years; it was one of the very highest, may I not say the highest, honor I have through life received.”

A certain temperamental sympathy between the two men is evident, though Macready sounded no such fathomless depths as lay, however unsuspected, in Browning; but Macready gives many indications of poetic sympathies, as, for instance, when he records in his diary how he had been looking through Coleridge’s translation of Wallenstein, “abounding with noble passages and beautiful scenes,” to see if it would lend itself to stage representation.

On November 19 of this autumn Macready notes in his journal that Browning came that night to bring his tragedy of “Strafford,” of which the fourth act was incomplete. “I requested him to write in the plot of what was deficient,” says Macready, and drove to the Garrick Club while Browning wrote out this story. Later, there was a morning call from Browning, who gave him an interesting old print of Richard, from some tapestry, and they talked of “La Vallière.” All the time we get glimpses of an interesting circle: Bulwer and Forster call, and they discuss Cromwell; Bulwer’s play of “Virginius” is in rehearsal; Macready acts Cardinal Wolsey; there is a dinner at Lady Blessington’s, where are met Lord Canterbury, Count D’Orsay, Bulwer, Trelawney, and Proctor; there is a call on Miss Martineau, and meetings with Thackeray and Dickens; Kenyon appears in the intersecting circles; Marston (the father of the blind poet) writes his play, “The Patrician’s Daughter”; Mr. Longfellow, “a Professor at one of the U. S. Universities,” appears on the scene, and there is a dinner at which “Mr. and Mrs. N. P. Willis sat next to Longfellow.” On a night when Browning came with some alterations for “Strafford,” a stranger called, “saying he was a Greek, a great lover of the drama; I introduced Browning to him as a great tragic poet,” records Macready, “and the youth wrote down his name, telling us he was setting off for Athens directly.”

The rehearsals of “Strafford” came on, but Macready seems already to have had misgivings. “In Shakespeare,” he writes, “the great poet has only introduced such events as act on the individuals concerned; but in Browning’s play we have a long scene of passion—upon what? A plan destroyed, a parliament dissolved....” It is easy to see how Browningesque this was; for to the poet no events of the objective life were so real and significant as those of the purely mental drama of thought, feeling, and purpose. The rehearsals were, however, gratifying to the author, it seems, for Macready records in his diary (that recurs like the chorus in a Greek tragedy) that he was happy “with the extreme delight Browning testified at the rehearsal of my part, which he said to him was a full recompense for having written the play, as he had seen his utmost hopes of character perfectly embodied.” The play was performed at the Covent Garden Theater on the night of May 3, 1837.

Both Edmund Gosse and William Sharp deny that Browning’s plays failed on the stage; at all events, with each attempt there were untoward circumstances which alone would have contributed to or even doomed a play to a short tenure.

In 1886 “Strafford” was produced in London under the auspices of the Browning Society, and the real power of the play surprised as well as deeply impressed the audiences who saw it. But “Pauline,” “Paracelsus,” and “Strafford” all have a peculiar element of reminiscent importance, if it may be so termed, in that they were the forerunners, the indications of the great work to come.

There is no dramatic poem of Browning’s that has not passages of superb acting effects, as well as psychological fascinations for the thinker; and the future years were to touch him with new power to produce work whose dramatic power lives in imperishable significance. “Strafford” had a run of only five nights at this first time of its production; Macready received and accepted an offer to go to America, and other things happened. Browning became absorbed in his “Sordello,” and suddenly, on Good Friday of 1838, he sailed for Venice, “intending to finish my poem among the scenes it describes,” he wrote to John Robertson, who had been introduced to Browning by Miss Martineau. On a sailing ship, bound for Trieste, the poet found himself the only passenger. It was on this voyage, while between Gibraltar and Naples, that he wrote “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.” It was written on deck, penciled on the fly-leaf of Bartoli’s De’ Simboli trasportati al Morale. When Dr. Corson first visited Browning in 1881, in his London home in Warwick Crescent, Browning showed his guest this identical copy of the book, with the penciled poem on the fly-leaves, of which Dr. Corson said, in a private letter to a friend:

“One book in the library I was particularly interested in,—Bartoli’s Simboli, or, rather, in what the poet had written in pencil on its fly-leaves, front and back, namely, ‘How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix.’”

Dr. Corson added that he had been so often asked as to what this “good news” was, that he put the question to Mr. Browning, who replied:

“‘I don’t remember whether I had in my mind any in particular, when I wrote the poem’; and then, after a pause,” continued Dr. Corson, “he said, with a dash of expression characteristic of him, ‘Of course, very important news were carried between those two cities during that period.’”

In Mrs. Orr’s biography of Browning she quotes a long letter written by him to Miss Haworth, in the late summer of 1838, after his return from this Italian trip, in which he says:

“You will see ‘Sordello’ in a trice, if the fagging fit holds. I did not write six lines while absent (except a scene in a play, jotted down as we sailed through the straits of Gibraltar), but I did hammer out some four, two of which are addressed to you,... I saw the most gorgeous and lavish sunset in the world.... I went to Trieste, then to Venice, then through Treviso, and Bassano to the mountains, delicious Asolo, all my places and castles you will see. Then to Vicenza, Padua, and Venice again. Then to Verona, Trent, Innspruck (the Tyrol), Munich, Salzburg, Frankfort and Mayence; down the Rhine to Cologne, then to Aix-le-Chapelle, Liège, and Antwerp; then home.... I saw very few Italians, ‘to know,’ that is. Those I did see I liked....”

It is related that the captain of the ship became so much attached to Browning that he offered him a free passage to Constantinople; and that his friendly attraction to his youthful passenger was such that on returning to England he brought to the poet’s sister a gift of six bottles of attar of roses. The poems of “Pippa Passes” and “In a Gondola” may be directly traced to this visit, and Browning seemed so invigorated by it that his imagination was aflame with a multitude of ideas at once.

Meanwhile “Paracelsus” was winning increasing appreciation. The poet did not escape the usual sweeping conclusion generally put forth regarding any unusual work, that the author has made extensive studies for it,—as if ideas and imagination drew their inspiration from the outer world, and were solely to be appraised, as to their results, by the capacity for cramming. So much cramming, so much genius! He who thus mistakes inspiration for industry certainly proves how very remote is his mind from the former. With this marvelous work by a young man of twenty-three the usual literary legends were set afloat, like thistledown in the air, which seem to have floated and alighted everywhere, and which now, more than seventy-five years later, are apparently still floating and alighting on the pens of various writers, to the effect that “Paracelsus” is the result of “vast research among contemporary records,” till the poem added another to the Seven Labors of Hercules. As a matter of fact, and as has already been noted, Browning had merely browsed about his father’s library.

Dr. Berdoe points out that the real “Paracelsus” cannot be understood without considerable excursions into the occult sciences, and he is quite right as to the illumination these provide, in proportionate degree as they are acquired by the reader; as a matter of course they enlarge his horizon, and offer him clues to unsuspected labyrinths; and so fine and complete is Dr. Berdoe’s own commentary on “Paracelsus” that it might not unduly be held as supplementary to the reader’s entire enjoyment of the poem. Dr. Berdoe notes that the Bishop of Spanheim, who was the instructor of Paracelsus, defined “divine magic,” as another name for alchemy, “and lays down the great doctrine of all medieval occultism, as of all modern theosophy,—of a soul-power equally operative in the material and the immaterial, in nature and in the consciousness of man.” The sympathetic reader of Browning’s “Paracelsus” will realize, however, that the drama he presents is spiritual, rather than occult. It is not the search for the possible mysteries, or achievements of the crucible. It is the adventure of the soul, not the penetration into the secrets of unknown elementals.

In the autumn of 1835 the Browning family removed from Camberwell to Hatcham. They bestowed themselves in a spacious, delightful old house, with “long, low rooms,” wherein the household gods, inclusive of the six thousand books of the elder Browning’s treasured library, found abundant accommodation; and the outlook on the Surrey hills gratified them all. During these years we catch a few glimpses of the poet’s only sister, Sarianna, who was two years younger than her brother, and quite as fond of listening to the conversation of an uncle, William Shergold Browning, who had removed to Paris. Here he was connected with the Rothschild banking house, and had achieved some distinction as the author of a “History of the Huguenots.” He also wrote two historical novels, entitled “Hoel Mar en Morven” and “Provost of Paris,” and compiled one of those harmless volumes entitled “Leisure Hours.” It was this uncle who had brought about the introduction of his nephew and Marquis Amédée de Ripert-Monclar, whose uncle, the Marquis de Fortia, a member of the Institut, was a special friend of William Shergold Browning. In later years a grandson of the Paris Browning, after graduating at Lincoln College, became Crown prosecutor in New South Wales. He is known as Robert Jardine Browning, and he was on terms of intimacy with his cousins, Robert and Sarianna, whom he often visited.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
From a drawing made by Field Talfourd, in Rome, 1855

The family friendship with Carlyle was a source of great pleasure to Mrs. Browning, the poet’s mother, and there is on record a night when Carlyle and his brother dined with the Brownings at Hatcham. Another family friend and habitué was the Rev. Archer Gurney, who at a later time became Chaplain to the British Embassy in Paris. Mr. Gurney was a writer of poems and plays, lyrics and dramatic verse, and a volume of his work entitled “Fra Cipollo and Other Poems” was published, from which Browning drew his motto for “Colombe’s Birthday.” Mr. Gurney was deeply interested in young Browning’s poetry, and there is a nebulous trace of his having something to do with the publication of “Bells and Pomegranates.” Another friend of the poet was Christopher Dowson, who married the sister of Alfred Domett; at their homes, Albion Terrace, and their summer cottage in Epping Forest, Browning was a frequent visitor. Dowson died early; but Field Talfourd (a brother of the author of “Ion” and the artist who made those crayon portraits of Browning and his wife, in the winter of 1859, in Rome), Joseph Arnould, and Alfred Domett, with one or two other young men, comprised the poet’s more intimate circle at this time. Arnould and Domett were both studying for the Bar; Arnould had gained the Newdigate in 1834, and had won great applause by his recital (in the Sheldonian Theater) of his “Hospice of St. Bernard.” Later he was offered the editorship of the Daily News, founded by Forster and Dickens, but he kept true to his legal studies and in time became the Judge of the High Court at Bombay, and was knighted by the Crown.

There was a dinner given by Macready at which Browning, Carlyle, and Miss Martineau were guests, and later a dinner at the Carlyles’ where Browning met a son of Burns “who sang some of his father’s songs.” To a friend Browning wrote: “I dined with dear Carlyle and his wife (catch me calling people ‘dear’ in a hurry) yesterday. I don’t know any people like them.”

Browning passed a day with Miss Martineau at Ascot, and again visited her in Elstree, where she was staying with the Macreadys. She greatly admired “Paracelsus,” and spoke of her first acquaintance with his poetry as a “wonderful event.” He dined with her at her home in Westminster, and there met John Robertson, the assistant editor of the Westminster Review, to which Miss Martineau was a valued contributor. Henry Chorley, a musical critic of the day, was another guest that night, and soon after Browning dined with him “in his bachellor abode,” the other guests being Arnould, Domett, and Bryan Proctor; later, at a musicale given by Chorley, Browning met Charlotte Cushman and Adelaide Kemble. Chorley drew around him the best musicians of the time: Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Liszt, David, and other great composers were often rendered in his chambers. Proctor was then living in Harley Street, and his house was a center for the literary folk of the day.

George Eliot speaks of the indifference with which we gaze at our unintroduced neighbor, “while Destiny stands by, sarcastic, with our dramatis personæ folded in her hands.” It was such an hour of destiny as this when, at a dinner given by Sergeant Talfourd, at his home (No. 56) in Russell Square, Browning first met John Kenyon. Our great events mostly come to us like gods in disguise, and this evening was no exception. Unknown and undreamed of, the young poet had come to one of those partings of the ways which are only recognized in the perspective of time. Browning’s life had been curiously free from any romance beyond that with the muses. The one woman with whom he had seemed most intimate, Miss Fanny Haworth, was eleven years his senior, and their intercourse, both conversationally and in letters, had been as impersonal as literature itself. She was a writer of stories and verse, and had celebrated her young friend in two sonnets. This friendship was one of literary attractions alone, and the poet had apparently devoted all his romance to poetry rather than demanded it in life. But now, golden doors were to open.

At this dinner at Mr. Talfourd’s, John Kenyon came over to the poet, after they had left the dining-room, and inquired if he were not the son of his old school-fellow, Robert Browning. Finding this surmise to be true, he became greatly attached to him. Mr. Kenyon had lost his wife some time previously; he had no children, and he was a prominent and favorite figure in London society. Southey said of Kenyon that he was “one of the best and pleasantest of men, whom every one likes better the longer he is known,” and Kenyon, declaring that Browning “deserved to be a poet, being one in heart and life,” offered to him his “best and most precious gift,”—that of an introduction to his second cousin, Elizabeth Barrett.

This was the first intimation of Destiny, but the meeting was still to remain in the future. “Sordello” was published in 1840,—“a colossal derelict on the ocean of poetry,” as William Sharp terms it. The impenetrable nature of the intricacies of the work has been the theme of many anecdotes. Tennyson declared that there were only two lines in it—the opening and the closing ones—which he understood, and “they are both lies,” he feelingly added. Douglas Jerrold tackled it when he was just recovering from an illness, and despairingly set down his inability to comprehend it to the probability that his mind was impaired by disease; and thrusting the book into the hands of his wife he entreated her to read it at once. He watched her breathlessly, and when she exclaimed, “I don’t know what this means; it is gibberish,” Jerrold exclaimed, “Thank God, I am not an idiot.”

Still another edifying testimony to the general inability to understand “Sordello” is given by a French critic, Odysse Barot, who quotes a passage where the poet says, “God gave man two faculties,” and adds, “I wish while He was about it (pendant qu’il était en train) God had supplied another—namely, the power of understanding Mr. Browning.”

Mrs. Carlyle declared that she read “Sordello” attentively twice, but was unable to discover whether the title referred to “a man, a city, or a tree”; yet most readers of this poem will be able to recognize that Sordello was a singer of the thirteenth century, whose fame suddenly lures him from the safety of solitude to the perils of society in Mantua, after which “immersion in worldliness” he again seeks seclusion, and partially recovers himself. The motif of the poem recalls the truth expressed in the lines:

“Who loves the music of the spheres
And lives on earth, must close his ears
To many voices that he hears.”

Suddenly a dazzling political career opens before Sordello; he is discovered to be—not a nameless minstrel, but the son of the great Ghibelline chief, Salinguerra; more marvelous still, he is loved by Palma, in her youthful beauty and fascination; and the crucial question comes, as in some form it must come to every life, whether he shall choose all the kingdoms of power and glory, or that kingdom which is not of earth, and cometh not with observation.

It is easy to realize how such a problem would appeal to Robert Browning. Notwithstanding the traditional “obscurity” of “Sordello,” it offers to the thoughtful reader a field of richest and most entrancing suggestion.

To Alfred Domett, under date of May 22, 1842, Browning writes:[1]

“... I cannot well say nothing of my constant thoughts of you, most pleasant remembrances of you, earnest desires for you. I have a notion you will come back some bright morning a dozen years hence and find me just gone—to heaven, or Timbuctoo! I give way to this fancy, for it lets me write what, I dare say, I have written niggardly enough, of my real love for you, better love than I had supposed I was fit for.... I have read your poems; you can do anything, and I should think would do much. I will if I live. At present, if I stand on head or heels I don’t know; what men require I know as little; and of what they are in possession I know not.... With this I send you your ‘Sordello.’ I suppose, I am sure, indeed, that the translation from Dante, on the fly-leaf, is your own....”

In another letter to Alfred Domett, Browning thus refers to Tennyson:

“... But how good when good he is! That noble ‘Locksley Hall!’”

Browning had already become enamored of Italy; and Mrs. Bridell-Fox, writing to William Sharp, speaks of meeting the poet after his return, and thus describes the impression he made upon her:[2]

“I remember him as looking in often in the evenings, having just returned from his first visit to Venice. I cannot tell the date for certain. He was full of enthusiasm for that Queen of Cities. He used to illustrate his glowing descriptions of its beauties, the palaces, the sunsets, the moonrises, by a most original kind of etching. Taking up a bit of stray notepaper, he would hold it over a lighted candle, moving the paper about gently till it was cloudily smoked over, and then utilizing the darker smears for clouds, shadows, water, or what not, would etch with a dry pen the forms of lights on cloud and palace, on bridge or gondola, on the vague and dreamy surface he had produced. My own passionate longing to see Venice dates from those delightful, well-remembered evenings of my childhood.”

This visit of the young poet to Italy forged the link of that golden chain which was to unite all his future with that land of art and song which held for him such wonderful Sibylline leaves of the yet undreamed-of chapters of his life.

CHAPTER IV

1833-1841

Elizabeth Barrett’s Love for the Greek Poets—Lyrical Work—Serious Entrance on Professional Literature—Noble Ideal of Poetry—London Life—Kenyon—First Knowledge of Robert Browning.

Elizabeth Barrett was but twelve days in translating the “Prometheus Bound” of Æschylus, and of the result of this swift achievement she herself declared, when laughingly discussing this work with Home in later years, that it ought to have been “thrown in the fire immediately afterward as the only means of giving it a little warmth.” Combined with a few of her other poems, however, it was published (anonymously) in 1832, and received from the Athenæum the edifying verdict that “those who adventure in the hazardous lists of poetic translation should touch any one rather than Æschylus, and they may take warning from the writer before us.”

The quiet life at Sidmouth goes on,—goes on, in fact, for three years,—and the life is not an unmixed joy to Miss Barrett. “I like the greenness and the tranquillity and the sea,” she writes to a friend. “Sidmouth is a nest among elms; and the lulling of the sea and the shadow of the hills make it a peaceful one; but there are no majestic features in the country. The grandeur is concentrated upon the ocean without deigning to have anything to do with the earth....”

In the summer of 1835 the Barretts left Sidmouth for London, locating at first in Gloucester Place (No. 74) where they remained for three years. Hugh Stuart Boyd had, in the meantime, removed to St. John’s Wood; Mr. Kenyon and Miss Mitford became frequent visitors. Miss Barrett’s literary activity was stimulated by London life, and she began contributing to a number of periodicals, and her letter-writing grew more and more voluminous. To Mr. Boyd she wrote soon after their arrival in London:

“As George is going to do what I am afraid I shall not be able to do to-day,—to visit you,—he must take with him a few lines from me, to say how glad I am to feel myself again only at a short distance from you; and gladder I shall be when the same room holds both of us. But I cannot open the window and fly.... How much you will have to say to me about the Greeks, unless you begin first to abuse me about the Romans. If you begin that, the peroration will be a very pathetic one, in my being turned out of your doors. Such is my prophecy.

“Papa has been telling me of your abusing my stanzas on Mrs. Hemans’s death. I had a presentiment that you would....”

If the classic lore and ponderous scholarship unfitted Mr. Boyd to feel the loveliness of this lyric, those who enter into its pathos may find some compensation for not being great classicists. It is in this poem that the lines occur,—

“Nor mourn, O living One, because her part in life was mourning:
Would she have lost the poet’s fire, for anguish of the burning?
··········
Albeit softly in our ears her silver song was ringing,
The foot-fall of her parting soul is softer than her singing.”

Miss Barrett’s fugitive poems of this time tell much of the story of her days. She sees Haydon’s portrait of Wordsworth, and it suggests the sonnet beginning:

“Wordsworth upon Helvellyn!...”

The poems written previously to “A Drama of Exile” do not at all indicate the power and beauty and the depth of significance for which all her subsequent work is so remarkable. “The Seraphim,” “Isobel’s Child,” “The Virgin Mary to the Child Jesus,” however much they may contain occasional glimpses of poetic fire, would never have established her rank. Yet “The Sleep” belongs to this period, and that poem of exquisite pathos, “Cowper’s Grave.” Anticipating a little, there came that poem which awakened England and the modern world, indeed, to a sense of the suffering of children in factory life, “The Cry of the Children,” which appeared almost simultaneously with Lord Shaftesbury’s great speech in Parliament on child labor. The poem and the statesman and philanthropist together aroused England.

A poem called “Confessions” is full of a mysterious power that haunts the reader in a series of pictures:

“Face to face in my chamber, my silent chamber, I saw her:
God and she and I only, there I sate down to draw her
Soul through the clefts of confession—‘Speak, I am holding thee fast,
As the angel of resurrection shall do at the last.’”

And what touching significance is in these lines:

“The least touch of their hands in the morning, I keep it by day and by night;
Their least step on the stair, at the door, still throbs through me, if ever so light.”

There were the “Crowned and Wedded” that celebrated the marriage of England’s beloved queen; “Bertha in the Lane,” which has been one of the most universal favorites of any of her lyrics; still later, “The Dead Pan,” which essentially embodies her highest convictions regarding the poetic art: that Poetry must be real, and, above all, true.

“O brave poets, keep back nothing,
Nor mix falsehood with the whole!
······
Hold, in high poetic duty,
Truest Truth the fairest Beauty!”

In such lines as these she expressed her deepest feeling.

Then appeared “Comfort,” “Futurity,” and “An Apprehension”; the dainty little picture of her childish days in “Hector in the Garden”; the sonnets to George Sand, on which the French biographer[3] of Mrs. Browning, in recent years, has commented, translating the first line,—

“Vrai genie, mais vraie femme!”

and adding that these words, addressed to George Sand, are illustrated by her own life.

The sonnet “Insufficiency,” of this period, closes with the lines,

“And what we best conceive we fail to speak.
Wait, soul, until thine ashen garments fall,
And then resume thy broken strains, and seek
Fit peroration without let or thrall.”

In all this work that deep religious note, that exaltation of spirituality which so completely characterized Elizabeth Barrett Browning, is felt by the reader. Religion was always to her a life, not a litany. The Divine Love was as the breath of life to her, wherein she lived and moved, and on which she relied for her very being.

The poem called “A Rhapsody of Life’s Progress,” though not often noted by the critical writers on Mrs. Browning, is one full of impressive lines, with that haunting refrain of every stanza,—

“O Life, O Beyond,
Thou art strange, thou art sweet!”

Albeit, a candid view must also recognize that this poem reveals those early faults, the redundancy, the almost recklessness of color and rhythm, that are much less frequently encountered in the poems of Mrs. Browning than they were in those of Miss Barrett. For poetic work is an art as well as a gift, and while “Poets are born, not made,” yet, being born, the poet must proceed also to make himself. In this “Rhapsody” occur the lines that are said to have thrown cultured Bostonians into a bewilderment exceptional; a baffled and despairing state not to be duplicated in all history, unless by that of the Greeks before the Eleusinian mysteries; the lines running,—

“Let us sit on the thrones
In a purple sublimity,
And grind down men’s bones
To a pale unanimity.”

Polite circles in Boston pondered unavailingly upon this medley, and were apparently reduced to the same mental condition as was Mrs. Carlyle when she read “Sordello.” Unfortunately for Jane Carlyle there were in her day no Browning societies, with their all-embracing knowledge, to which Browning himself conveniently referred all persons who questioned him as to the meaning of certain passages. One Boston woman, not unknown to fame, recalls even now that she walked the Common, revolving these cryptic lines in her mind, and meeting Dr. Holmes, asked if he understood them, to which the Autocrat replied, “God forbid!”

This very affluence of feeling, however, or even recklessness of imagery, was not without its place as a chastened and subdued factor in the power of Miss Barrett later on. From her earliest childhood she had the scholar’s instinct and love of learning; she read fluently French, German, and Italian; she was well grounded in Latin, and for the Greek she had that impassioned love that made its literature to her an assimilation rather than an acquirement. Its rich intellectual treasure entered into her inmost life. She also read Hebrew, and all her life kept with her a little Hebrew Bible, as well as a Greek Testament, the margins of both of which are filled with her notes and commentaries in her clear, microscopic handwriting. Miss Barrett’s earliest work, published anonymously, at her father’s expense, rather to gratify himself and a few friends than to make any appeal to the public, had no special claim to literary immortality, whatever its promise; but once in London, something in the very atmosphere seemed to act as a solvent to precipitate her nebulous dreams and crystallize them into definite and earnest aims. Poetry had always been to her “its own exceeding great reward,” but she was now conscious of a desire to enter into the stress and storm of the professional writer, who must sink or swim, accept the verdict of success or failure, and launch forth on that career whose very hardships and uncertainties are a part of its fascination. To Elizabeth Barrett, secure in her father’s home, there was little possibility of the hardships and privations on the material side not unfrequently incidental to the pursuit of letters, but to every serious worker life prefigures itself as something not unlike the Norse heaven with its seven floors, each of which must be conquered.

“Here a star, and there a star,
Some lose their way,—
Here a mist, and there a mist,
Afterwards ... day!”

Miss Barrett finds London “wrapped up like a mummy, in a yellow mist,” but she tries to like it, and “looks forward to seeing those here whom we might see nowhere else.” Her brother George, who had recently graduated from the University of Glasgow, was now a barrister student at the Inner Temple. Henrietta and Arabel, the two sisters, found interest and delight in the new surroundings.

Retrospectively viewed, Mrs. Browning’s life falls easily into three periods, which seem to name themselves as a prelude, an interlude, and a realization. She was just past her twenty-ninth birthday when the family came up to London, and up to that time she had, indeed, lived with dreams and visions for her company. These years were but the prelude, the preparatory period. She then entered on the experimental phase, the testing of her powers, the interlude that lay between early promise and later fulfillment. In her forty-first year came her marriage to Robert Browning and the beginning of those nearly fifteen years of marvelous achievement, during which the incomparable “Sonnets from the Portuguese” and “Aurora Leigh” were written,—the period of realization.

Before the beginning of the London period Miss Barrett’s literary work had been largely that of the amateur, though in the true meaning of that somewhat misused term, as the lover, rather than as merely the more or less crude experimenter. For Poetry to Elizabeth Barrett was a divine commission no less than an inborn gift. Under any circumstances, she would have poured her life “with passion into music,” and with the utmost sincerity could she have said, with George Eliot’s “Armgart,”

“I am not glad with that mean vanity
Which knows no good beyond its appetite
Full feasting upon praise! I am only glad,
Being praised for what I know is worth the praise;
Glad of the proof that I myself have part
In what I worship!”

As is revealed and attested in many expressions of her maturer years, Poetry was to her the most serious, as well as the most enthralling, of pursuits, while she was also a very accomplished scholar. A special gift, and a facility for the acquirement of scholarly knowledge in the academic sense, do not invariably go together; often is the young artist so bewitched with his gift, so entranced with the glory and the splendor of a dream, that the text-book, by contrast, is a dull page, to which he cannot persuade himself to turn. To him the air is peopled with visions and voices that fascinate his attention. In the college days of James Russell Lowell is seen an illustration of this truth, the young student being temporarily suspended, and sent—not to Coventry, but to Concord. Perhaps the banishment of a Harvard student for the high crime and misdemeanor of being addicted to rhyme rather than mathematics, and his penalty in the form of exile to Concord, the haunt of Emerson and the Muses, may have made Pan laugh. But, at all events, Miss Barrett was as naturally a scholar, in the fullest significance of the term, as she was a poet. This splendid equipment was a tremendous factor in that splendor of achievement, and in that universally recognized success, that has made the name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning immortal in all ages, as the greatest woman poet the world has ever known.

The professional literary life is a drama in itself,—comedy, or tragedy, as may be, and usually a mixture of both. It ranges over wide areas of experience, from that of the author of “Richard Feverel,” who is said to have written that novel on a diet of oatmeal and cold water, to that of the luxurious author whose séances with the Muses are decorously conducted in irreproachable interiors, with much garnishing, old rose and ivory, ebony carvings, and inlaid desks, at which the marvelous being who now and then condescends to “dictate” a “best seller,” is apt to be surprised by a local photographer. But as a noted educator defined a University as “a log,—with Mark Hopkins sitting on the other end,” so the “real thing” in a literary career may not inaptly be typified by Louisa Alcott sitting on the back stairs, writing on an old atlas; and it was into actualities somewhat like these that Elizabeth Barrett desired to plunge. The question that she voiced in later years, in “Aurora Leigh,”—

“My own best poets, am I one with you,
That thus I love you,—or but one through love?
Does all this smell of thyme about my feet
Conclude my visit to your holy hill
In personal presence, or but testify
The rustling of your vesture through my dreams
With influent odours?”—

this question, in substance, stirred now in her life, and insisted upon reply. She must, like all real poets, proceed to “hang her verses in the wind,” and watch if perchance there are

“... the five
Which five hundred will survive.”

Elizabeth Barrett was of a simplicity that had no affinities with the poseur in any respect, and she had an inimitable sense of humor that pervaded all her days. Wit and pathos are, indeed, so closely allied that it would be hardly possible that the author of the “De Profundis,” a poem that sounds the profoundest depths of the human soul, should not have the corresponding quality of the swiftest perception of the humorous. It was somewhere about this time that Poe sent to her a volume of his poems with an inscription on the fly-leaf that declared her to be “the noblest of her sex.”

“And what could I say in reply,” she laughingly remarked, “but ‘Sir, you are the most discerning of yours!’”

The first poem of hers that was offered in a purely professional way was “The Romaunt of Margret.” It appeared in the New Monthly Magazine, then edited by Bulwer, who was afterward known as the first Lord Lytton. At this time Richard Hengist Horne was basking in the fame of his “Orion,” and to him Miss Barrett applied, through a mutual friend, as to whether her enclosed poem had any title to that name, or whether it was mere verse. “As there could be no doubt in the mind of the recipient on that point,” said Mr. Horne, “the poem was forwarded to Bulwer, and duly appeared. The next one sent,” continues Mr. Horne, “started the poetess at once on her bright and noble career.” This “next one” appears to have been “The Poet’s Vow,” and a confirmation of this supposition is seen in a letter of hers at this date to Mr. Boyd, in which she explains her not having at hand a copy of the Athenæum that he had wished to see, and adds:

“I can give you, from memory, the Athenæum’s review in that number. The critic says ‘It is rich in poetry ... including a fine, although too dreamy, ballad, The Poet’s Vow. We are almost tempted to pause and criticise the work of an artist of so much inspiration and promise as the author of this poem, and to exhort him to a greater clearness of expression, and less quaintness in the choice of his phraseology, but this is not the time or place for digression.’

“You see my critic has condemned me with a very gracious countenance. Do put on yours.”

Again, under date of October, 1836, she writes to Mr. Boyd:

“... But what will you say to me when I confess that in the face of all your kind encouragement, my Drama of the Angels (The Seraphim) has not been touched until the last three days? It was not out of pure idleness on my part, nor of disregard to your admonition; but when my thoughts were distracted with other things, books just began enclosing me all around, a whole load of books upon my conscience, and I could not possibly rise to the gate of heaven and write about my angels. You know one can’t sometimes sit down to the sublunary occupation of even reading Greek, unless one feels free to it. And writing poetry requires a double liberty, and an inclination which comes only of itself....

“... I have had another note from the editor—very flattering, and praying for farther supplies. The ‘Angels’ were not ready, and I was obliged to send something else.”

A discussion arises in the family regarding the taking of a house in Wimpole Street, and Elizabeth remarks that for her part she would rather go on inhabiting castles in the air than to live in that particular house, “whose walls look so much like Newgate’s turned inside out.” She continues, however, that if it is decided upon, she has little doubt she will wake and sleep very much as she would anywhere else. With a strong will, and an intense, resistless kind of energy in holding any conviction, and an independence of character only equalled by its preeminent justice and generous magnanimity, she was singularly free from any tenacious insistence upon the matters of external life. She had her preferences; but she always accommodated herself to the decision or the necessity of the hour, and there was an end of it. She had that rare power of instantaneous mental adjustment; and if a given thing were right and best, or if it were not best but was still inevitable, she accepted it and did not make life a burden to every one concerned by endless discussion.

London itself did not captivate her fancy. “Did Dr. Johnson in his paradise in Fleet Street love the pavements and the walls?” she questioned. “I doubt that,” she added; “the place, the privileges, don’t mix in one’s love as is done by the hills and the seaside.”

The privileges, however, became more and more interesting to her. One of these was when she met Wordsworth, whom she describes as being “very kind,” and that he “let her hear his conversation.”

This conversation she did not find “prominent,” for she saw at the same time Landor, “the brilliant Landor,” she notes, and felt the difference “between great genius and eminent talent.” But there was a day on which she went to Chiswick with Wordsworth and Miss Mitford, and all the way she thought she must be dreaming. It was Landor, though, who captivated her fancy at once, as he already had that of her future poet-lover and husband, who was yet unrevealed to her. Landor, “in whose hands the ashes of antiquity burn again,” she writes, gave her two Greek epigrams he had recently written. All this time she is reading everything,—Sheridan Knowles’s play of “The Wreckers,” which Forrest had rejected, “rather for its unfitness to his own personal talent than for its abstract demerit,” she concludes; and “Ion,” which she finds beautiful morally rather than intellectually, and thinks that, as dramatic poetry, it lacks power, passion, and condensation. Reading Combe’s “Phrenology,” she refers to his theory that slowness of the pulse is a sign of the poetical impulse. If this be true, she fears she has no hope of being a poet, “for my pulse is in a continual flutter,” she notes; and she explains to Mr. Boyd that the line

“One making one in strong compass”

in “The Poet’s Vow,” which he found incomprehensible, really means that “the oneness of God, ‘in Whom are all things,’ produces a oneness, or sympathy, with all things. The unity of God preserves a unity in man.”

All in all, Miss Barrett is coming to enjoy her London life. There was the Royal Academy, “and real live poets, with their heads full of the trees and birds, and sunshine of Paradise”; and she has “stood face to face with Wordsworth and Landor”; Miss Mitford has become a dear friend, but she visits London only at intervals, as she lives—shades of benighted days!—thirty miles from London. A twentieth century residence across the continent could hardly seem more remote.

The removal to Wimpole Street was decided upon, and to that house (No. 50), gloomy or the reverse, the Barretts migrated. Miss Barrett’s new book, under the title of “The Seraphim and Other Poems,” was published, marking her first professional appearance before the public over her own name. “I feel very nervous about it,” she said; “far more than I did when my ‘Prometheus’ crept out of the Greek.”

Mr. Kenyon was about to go to Rydal Mount on a visit to Wordsworth, and Miss Barrett begs him to ask, as for himself, two garden cuttings of myrtle or geranium, and send to her—two, that she may be sure of saving one.

Autographs had value in those days, and in a note to Mr. Bray Miss Barrett alludes to one of Shakespeare’s that had been sold for a hundred pounds and asks if he feels sure of the authenticity of his own Shakespearean autograph.

A new poetic era had dawned about the time that “The Seraphim” appeared. Tennyson had written “Audley Court,” and was beginning to be known in America, owing this first introduction to Emerson, who visited Landor in Florence and made some sojourn afterward in England. The Boston publishing house of C. C. Little and Company (now Little, Brown, and Company) had written to Tennyson (under date of April 27, 1838) regarding a republishing of his volume, as the future laureate was already recognized for the musical quality and perfection of art in his work. Browning had published only “Pauline,” “Paracelsus,” and “Strafford.” Shelley and Keats were dead, their mortal remains reposing in the beautiful English cemetery in Rome, under the shadow of the tall cypresses, by the colossal pyramid of Caius Cestus. Byron and Scott and Coleridge had also died. There were Landor and Southey, Rogers and Campbell; but with Miss Barrett there came upon the scene a new minstrelsy that compelled its own recognition. Some of her shorter poems had caught the popular ear; notably, her “Cowper’s Grave,” which remains, to-day, one of her most appealing and exquisite lyrics.

“It is a place where poets crowned may feel the heart’s decaying;
It is a place where happy saints may weep amid their praying.”

The touching pathos of the line,

“O Christians, at your cross of hope a hopeless hand was clinging!”

moves every reader. And what music and touching appeal in the succeeding stanza:

“And now, what time ye all may read through dimming tears his story,
How discord on the music fell and darkness on the glory,
And how when, one by one, sweet sounds and wandering lights departed,
He wore no less a loving face because so broken-hearted.”

In seeing, “on Cowper’s grave,... his rapture in a vision,” Miss Barrett pictured his strength—

“... to sanctify the poet’s high vocation.”

Her reverence for poetic art finds expression in almost every poem that she has written.

Among other shorter poems included with “The Seraphim” were “The Poet’s Vow,” “Isobel’s Child,” and others, including, also, “The Romaunt of Margret.” The Athenæum pronounced the collection an “extraordinary volume,—especially welcome as an evidence of female genius and accomplishment,—but hardly less disappointing than extraordinary. Miss Barrett’s genius is of a high order,” the critic conceded; but he found her language “wanting in simplicity.” One reviewer castigated her for presuming to take such a theme as “The Seraphim” “from which Milton would have shrank!” All the critics agree in giving her credit for genius of no ordinary quality; but the general consensus of opinion was that this genius manifested itself unevenly, that she was sometimes led into errors of taste. That she was ever intentionally obscure, she denied. “Unfortunately obscure” she admitted that she might be, but “willingly so,—never.”

Of the personal friends of Elizabeth Barrett one of the nearest was Mary Russell Mitford, who was nineteen years her senior. Miss Mitford describes her at the time of their meeting as having “such a look of youthfulness that she had some difficulty in persuading a friend that Miss Barrett was old enough to be introduced into society.” Miss Mitford added that she was “certainly one of the most interesting persons” she had ever seen; “of a slight, delicate figure,... large, tender eyes, and a smile like a sunbeam.”

Mr. Kenyon brought Andrew Crosse, a noted electrician of the day, to see Miss Barrett; and in some reminiscences[4] written by Mrs. Andrew Crosse there is a chapter on “John Kenyon and his Friends” that offers the best comprehension, perhaps, of this man who was so charming and beloved a figure in London society,—a universal favorite. Born in 1784 in Jamaica, the son of a wealthy land-owner, he was sent to England as a lad, educated there, and in 1815 he set out for a tour of the continent. In 1817, in Paris, he met and became intimate with Professor George Ticknor of Harvard University, the Spanish historian; and through this friendship Mr. Kenyon came to know many of the distinguished Americans of the day, including Emerson, Longfellow, and Willis. Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth, and Landor were among Kenyon’s most intimate circle; and there is a record of one of his dinners at which the guests were Daniel Webster, Professor and Mrs. Ticknor, Dickens, Montalembert, and Lady Mary Shepherd. In 1823 Kenyon married Miss Curteis, and they lived for some years in Devonshire Place, with frequent interludes of travel on the continent. Mrs. Kenyon died in 1835, but when the Barretts came up to London Kenyon had resumed his delightful hospitalities, of which he made fairly a fine art. Professor Ticknor has left an allusion to another dinner at Kenyon’s where he met Miss Barrett. In the autumn of 1839 Miss Barrett, accompanied by her brother Edward, went to Torquay, for the warmer climate, and Mr. Kenyon also had gone there for the winter. Around him were gathered a group of notable friends, with whom Miss Barrett, his cousin (with one remove), was constantly associated,—Landor, Andrew Crosse, Theodosia Garrow (afterwards the wife of Thomas Adolphus Trollope), and Bezzi, an accomplished Italian, who was afterward associated with Seymour Kirkup in discovering Dante’s portrait concealed under the whitewash applied to the walls of the Bargello in Florence. Miss Barrett was at this time entering into that notable correspondence with Richard Hengist Horne, many of these letters containing passages of interest. For instance, of poetry we find her saying:

“If poetry under any form be exhaustible, Nature is; and if Nature is, we are near a blasphemy, and I, for one, could not believe in the immortality of the soul.

‘Si l’âme est immortelle,
L’amour ne l’est-il-pas?’

Extending l’amour into all love of the ideal, and attendant power of idealizing.... I don’t believe in mute, inglorious Miltons, and far less in mute, inglorious Shakespeares.”

Referring to some correspondence with Miss Martineau, Miss Barrett characterizes her as “the noblest female intelligence between the seas,” and of Tennyson, in relation to some mention of him, she wrote that “if anything were to happen to Tennyson, the whole world should go into mourning.”

A project (said to have originated with Wordsworth) was launched to “modernize” Chaucer, in which Miss Barrett, Leigh Hunt, Monckton Milnes, Mr. Horne, and one or two others enthusiastically united, the only dissenter being Landor, who characteristically observed that any one who was fit to read Chaucer at all could read him in the original. Later on the co-operation of Browning, Tennyson, Talfourd, Bulwer, Mary Howitt, and the Cowden Clarkes was solicited and in part obtained. But Landor held firm, and of his beloved Chaucer he said: “I will have no hand in breaking his dun, but rich-painted glass, to put in thinner (if clearer) panes.” A great deal of correspondence ensued in connection with this Herculean labor, most of which is of less interest to the general reader than it might well be to the literary antiquarian.

The next special literary enthusiasm of Mr. Horne and Miss Barrett was the projection of a work of criticism, to be issued anonymously, and entitled “The New Spirit of the Age.” They collaborated on the critique on Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt, and for the one on Landor Miss Barrett was mainly responsible, in which she says he “writes poetry for poets, and criticism for critics;... and as if poetry were not, in English, a sufficiently unpopular dead language, he has had recourse to writing poetry in Latin.” She speaks of his “Pericles and Aspasia” and his “Pentameron” as “books for the world and for all time, complete in beauty of sentiment and subtlety of criticism.” Two of Landor’s works, very little known, the “Poems from the Arabic and Persian” and “A Satire upon Satirists,” are here noted. “It will be delightful to me to praise Tennyson,—although, by Saint Eloy, I never imitated him,” she writes to Mr. Horne; “and I take that oath because the Quarterly was sure that if it had not been for him I should have hung a lady’s hair ‘blackly’ instead of ‘very blackly.’” Miss Mitford was somewhat concerned with this hazardous venture, but she had no desire to discuss Dickens, as she “could not admire his love of low life!” Miss Barrett’s appreciation of Tennyson is much on record. She finds him “a divine poet.” Monckton Milnes, whose first work she liked extremely, seemed to her in his later poems as wanting in fire and imagination, and as being too didactic. Barry Cornwall’s lyrics impressed her “like embodied music.” Mr. Horne finally wrote the critique on Dickens, and of it Miss Barrett said: “I think the only omission of importance in your admirable essay is the omission of the influence of the French school of imaginative literature upon the mind of Dickens, which is manifest and undeniable.... Did you ever read the powerful Trois Jours d’un Condamné, and will you confront that with the tragic saliences of ‘Oliver Twist’?... We have no such romance writer as Victor Hugo ... George Sand is the greatest female genius of the world, at least since Sappho.” (At this time George Eliot had not appeared.) Miss Barrett appreciatively alludes to Sir Henry Taylor (the author of “Philip van Artevelde”) as “an infidel in poetry,” and to the author of “Festus” as “a man of great thoughts.” She finds part of the poem “weak,” but, “when all is said,” she continues, “what poet-stuff remains! what power! what fire of imagination, worth the stealing of Prometheus!”

In relation to some strictures on Carlyle, Miss Barrett vivaciously replies that his object is to discover the sun, not to specify the landscape, and that it would be a strange reproach to bring against the morning star that it does not shine in the evening.

The idea of a lyrical drama, “Psyche Apocalypte,” was entertained by Mr. Horne and Miss Barrett, but, fortunately, no fragment of it was materialized into public light. There was a voluminous correspondence between them concerning this possible venture. Meanwhile Miss Barrett’s poems won success past her “expectation or hope. Blackwood’s high help was much,” she writes, “and I continue to have the kindest letters from unknown readers.... The American publisher has printed fifteen hundred copies. If I am a means of ultimate loss to him, I shall sit in sackcloth.”

In another of her letters to Mr. Horne we read that Wordsworth is in a fever because of a projected railroad through the Lake Country, and that Carlyle calls Harriet Martineau “quite mad,” because of her belief in Mesmerism. “For my own part,” adds Miss Barrett, “I am not afraid to say that I almost believe in Mesmerism, and quite believe in Harriet Martineau.” She is delighted that Horne’s “Orion” is to be published in New York. “I love the Americans,” she asserts, “a noble and cordial people.”

Miss Barrett remained for three years in Torquay, the climate being regarded as better for her health. But the tragedy of her life took place there in the drowning of her brother Edward, who went out one day with two friends in a boat and never returned. Three days later the boat was found floating, overturned, and the bodies of the three young men were recovered. This sad event occurred in the August of 1840, and it was more than a year before she was able to resume her literary work and her correspondence. In the September of 1841 she returned to London, and in a letter to Mr. Boyd soon after she replied to his references to Gregory as a poet, saying she has not much admiration even for his grand De Virginitate, and chiefly regards him as one who is only poetical in prose.

Miss Barrett’s delicacy of health through all these years has been so universally recorded (and, according to her own words, so exaggerated) that it needs no more than passing allusion here. So far as possible she herself ignored it, and while it was always a factor to be reckoned with, yet her boundless mental energy tided her over illness and weakness to a far greater degree than has usually been realized. “My time goes to the best music when I read or write,” she says, “and whatever money I can spend upon my own pleasures flows away in books.”

Elizabeth Barrett was the most sympathetic and affectionate of friends, and her devotion to literature resulted in no mere academic and abnormal life. Her letters are filled with all the little inquiries and interests of household affection and sweetness of sympathy with the personal matters of relatives and friends, and if those are not here represented, it is simply that they are in their nature colloquial, and to be taken for granted rather than repeated for reading, when so long separated by time from the conditions and circumstances that called them forth. She was glad to return from Torquay to her family again. “Papa’s domestic comfort is broken up by the separation,” she said, “and the associations of Torquay lie upon me, struggle against them as I may, like a nightmare.... Part of me is worn out; but the poetical part—that is, the love of poetry—is growing in me as freshly every day. Did anybody ever love poetry and stop in the middle? I wonder if any one ever could?... besides, I am becoming better. Dear Mr. Boyd,” she entreats, “do not write another word about my illness either to me or to others. I am sure you would not willingly disturb me. I can’t let ... prescribe anything for me except her own affection.” These words illustrate the spirit in which Miss Barrett referred to her own health. No one could be more remote from a morbid invalidism too often associated with her.

One of her first efforts after her return from Torquay was to send to the Athenæum some Greek translations, which, to her surprise, were accepted, and she writes to Mr. Boyd that she would enclose to him the editor’s letter “if it were legible to anybody except people used to learn reading from the Pyramids.” It must have been due to a suggestion from the editor of the Athenæum at this time that she wrote her noble and affluent essay on “The Greek Christian Poets,” which is perhaps her finest work in prose. Something in the courteous editorial note suggested this to her, and she discusses the idea with Mr. Boyd.

Mr. Dilke was then the editor of the Athenæum. He quite entered into the idea of this essay, only begging Miss Barrett to keep away from theology. Mr. Dilke also suggests that she write a review of English poetical literature, from Chaucer to contemporary times, and this initiated her essay called “The Book of the Poets.” For her Greek review she desired a copy of the Poetæ Christiani, but found the price (fourteen guineas) ruinous. But whether she had all the needful data or not, the first paper was a signal success, and she fancied that some bona avis, as good as a nightingale, had shaken its wings over her. Of the three Greek tragedians, Æschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, Elizabeth Barrett had read every line. Plato she loved and read exhaustively; of Aristotle at this time she had read his Ethics, Poetics, and his work on Rhetoric, and of Aristophanes a few, only, of his plays. But Miss Barrett was also a great novel-reader, keeping her “pillows stuffed with novels,” as she playfully declared. Her room, in the upper part of the house, revealed the haunt of the scholar. Upon a bracket the bust of Homer looked down; her bookcase showed one entire shelf occupied by the Greek poets; another relegated wholly to the English poets; and philosophy, ethics, science, and criticism were liberally represented. A bust of Chaucer companioned that of Homer. By her sofa nestled Flush, her dog, Miss Mitford’s gift.

It was in this year of 1841 that there penetrated into her atmosphere and consciousness the first intimation of Robert Browning. “Pippa Passes” had just been published, and John Kenyon, ever alert to bring any happiness into the lives of his friends (Kenyon, “the joy-giver,” as he was well termed), suggested introducing the young poet to her, but on the plea of her ill-health she declined. A little later, in a letter to Mr. Boyd, she mentions one or two comments made on her essay, “The Greek Christian Poets,”—that Mr. Horne, and also “Mr. Browning, the poet,” had both, as she was told, expressed approval. “Mr. Browning is said to be learned in Greek,” she adds, “especially the dramatists.” So already the air begins to stir and tremble with the coming of him of whom in later days she wrote:

“I yield the grave for thy sake, and resign
My near sweet view of heaven for earth with thee.”

The entrancing thrill of that wonderful Wagner music that ushers in the first appearance of the knight in the music-drama of “Lohengrin” is typical of the vibrations that thrill the air in some etherial announcement of experiences that are on the very threshold, and which are recognized by a nature as sensitive and impressionable as was that of Elizabeth Barrett. A new element with its transfiguring power awaited her, and some undefined prescience of that

“... most gracious singer of high poems”