The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning
that Ticknor and Fields of Boston have sent—one they were not in the least obliged to send,” replied the poet.
In those days there was no international copyright, but Mr. Browning’s Boston publishers needed no legal constraint to act with ideal honor. So on the appointed morning, a partie carré of artists—two poets, one sculptor, one painter—drove gayly through the Porta San Giovanni, on that road to Albano, with its wonderful views of the Claudian aqueducts in the distance, through whose arches the blue sky is bluer, and beyond which are the violet-hued Alban hills. Then, as now, the road led by the Casa dei Spirite, with its haunting associations, and its strange mural decorations of specters and wraiths. Past that overhanging cliff, with its tragic legend, they drove, encountering the long procession of wine carts, with their tinkling bells, and the dogs guarding the sleeping padrones. Passing the night in Albano, the next day they mounted donkeys for their excursion into the Alban hills, past lonely monasteries, up the heights of Rocca di Papa, where the traveler comes on the ancient camping-ground of Hannibal, and where they see the padres and acolytes sunning themselves on the slopes of Monte Cavo; on again, to the rocky terraces from which one looks down on Alba Longa and the depths of Lago di Nemi, beneath whose waters is still supposed to be the barque of Caligula, and across the expanse of the green Campagna to where Æneas landed.
The Campagna and Ruins of the Claudian Aqueducts, Rome.
“There, branching from the brickwork’s cleft, Some old tomb’s ruin....”
Two in the Campagna.
Miss Hosmer is the authority on this poetic pilgrimage, and she related that they all talked of art, of the difficulties of art,—those encountered by the poet, the sculptor, and the painter,—each regarding his own medium of expression as the most difficult. Mrs. Browning’s “Hatty” had bestowed in her bag a volume of Mr. Browning’s, and on the homeward journey from Albano to Rome he read aloud to them his “Saul.” At the half-way house on the Campagna, the Torre di Mezza, they paused, to gaze at the “weird watcher of the Roman Campagna,” the monument to Apuleia, whose ruins are said to have assumed her features.
Nothing in all the classic atmosphere of Rome, filled with the most impressive associations of its mighty past, appealed more strongly to the Brownings than the glorious Campagna, with its apparently infinite open space, brilliant with myriads of flowers, and the vast billowing slopes that break like green waves against the purple hills, in their changeful panorama of clouds and mists and snow-crowned heights dazzling under a glowing sun.
Fascinating as this winter in Rome had been to them, rich in friendships and in art, the Brownings were yet glad to return to their Florence with the May days, to give diligence and devotion to their poetic work, which nowhere proceeded so felicitously as in Casa Guidi.
Browning was now definitely engaged on the poems that were to make up the “Men and Women.” Mrs. Browning was equally absorbed in “Aurora Leigh.” Each morning after their Arcadian repast of coffee and fruit, he went to his study, and she to the salotto, whose windows opened on the terrace looking out on old gray San Felice where she always wrote, to devote themselves to serious work. “Aurora Leigh” proceeded rapidly some mornings, and again its progress would remind her of the web of Penelope. During this summer Browning completed “In a Balcony,” and wrote the “Holy Cross Day,” the “Epistle of Karnish,” and “Ben Karshook’s Wisdom.” Like his wife, Browning held poetry to be above all other earthly interests; he was a poet by nature and by grace, and his vast range of scholarship, his “British-Museum-Library memory,” and his artistic feeling and taste, all conserved to this one end. But poetry to him was not outside, but inclusive of the very fullest human life. Mrs. Browning’s lines,
“... No perfect artist is developed here
From any imperfect woman,...”
embodied his convictions as well, for man and woman alike. He had that royal gift of life in its fullness, an almost boundless capacity of enjoyment, and to him life meant the completest development and exercise of all its powers.
The Brownings found their Florentine circle all in evidence. Mr. Lytton, a favorite and familiar visitor at Casa Guidi; Frederick Tennyson (and perhaps his “forty fiddlers” as well), and the Trollopes, Isa Blagden, and various wandering minstrels. They passed evenings with Mr. Lytton in his villa, and would walk home “to the song of nightingales by starlight and firefly light.” To Mrs. Browning Florence looked more beautiful than ever after Rome. “I love the very stones of it,” she said. Limitations of finance kept them in Florence all that summer. “A ship was to have brought us in something, and brought us in nothing,” she explained to a friend in England, “and the nothing had a discount, beside.” But she took comfort in the fact that Penini was quite as well and almost as rosy as ever, despite the intense heat; and the starlight and the song of the nightingales were not without consolation. A letter from Milsand (“one of the noblest and most intellectual men,” says Mrs. Browning of him) came, and they were interested in his arraignment of the paralysis of imagination in literature. In September she hears from Miss Mitford of her failing health, and tenderly writes: “May the divine love in the face of our Lord Jesus Christ shine upon you day and night, with His ineffable tenderness.” Mrs. Browning’s religious feeling was always of that perfect reliance on the Divine Love that is the practical support of life. “For my own part,” she continues, “I have been long convinced that what we call death is a mere incident in life.... I believe that the body of flesh is a mere husk that drops off at death, while the spiritual body emerges in glorious resurrection at once. Swedenborg says some people do not immediately realize that they have passed death, which seems to me highly probable. It is curious that Frederick Denison Maurice takes this precise view of the resurrection, with apparent unconsciousness of what Swedenborg has stated, and that I, too, long before I had ever read Swedenborg, or had even heard the name of Maurice, came to the same conclusion.... I believe in an active, human life, beyond death, as before it, an uninterrupted life.” Mrs. Browning would have found herself in harmony with that spiritual genius, Dr. William James, who said: “And if our needs outrun the visible universe, why may not that be a sign that the invisible universe is there? Often our faith in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.” Faith is the divine vision, and no one ever more absolutely realized this truth than Elizabeth Browning.
“Ah, blessed vision! blood of God! My spirit beats her mortal bars, As down dark tides the glory slides, And star-like mingles with the stars.”
At another time Mrs. Browning remarked that she should fear for a revealed religion incapable of expansion, according to the needs of man; while Dr. James has said, “Believe what is in the line of your needs.” Many similarities of expression reveal to how wonderful a degree Mrs. Browning had intuitively grasped phases of truth that became the recognized philosophy of a succeeding generation, and which were stamped by the brilliant and profound genius of William James, the greatest psychologist of the nineteenth century. “What comes from God has life in it,” said Mrs. Browning, “and certainly from the growth of all living things, spiritual growth cannot be excepted.”
The summer passed “among our own nightingales and fireflies,” playfully said Mrs. Browning, and in the autumn Mrs. Sartoris stopped to see them, on her way to Rome, “singing passionately and talking eloquently.”
Notwithstanding some illness, Mrs. Browning completed four thousand lines of “Aurora Leigh” before the new year of 1855, in which were expressed all her largest philosophic thought, and her deepest insight into the problems of life. Fogazzaro, whose recent death has deprived Italy of her greatest literary inspirer since Carducci, said of “Aurora Leigh” that he wished the youth of Italy might study this great poem,—“those who desire poetic fame that they might gain a high conception of poetry; the weak, in that they might find stimulus for strength; the sad and discouraged, in that they might find comfort and encouragement.” It was this eminent Italian novelist and Senator (the King of Italy naming a