The Complete Works of Robert Browning: Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition. Robert Browning
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
“O Life, O Beyond,
Art thou fair, art thou sweet?” “How the world is made for each of us! How all we perceive and know in it Tends to some moment’s product thus, When a soul declares itself—to wit, By its fruit, the thing it does!”
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?
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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!
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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,