Robert Browning - The Complete Works of Robert Browning - Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition

Give my true regard to your mother, and thank her for her goodness in understanding me. But I write only to have a pleasant chat with you, in a balcony, looking for fire-flies in the garden, wider between us than the slanting Pitti façade, now that it’s warm and Maylike in Florence.

Always yours,

Robert Browning.

Kate Field

From a portrait painted by Elihu Vedder, Florence, 1860.

Mr. Browning had now begun to think of placing his son, who had passed his sixteenth birthday, in Oxford. In quest of this desire the poet sought the acquaintance of Dr. Jowett, afterward Master of Balliol College. This initiated a friendship between Browning and Jowett that lasted all the poet’s life, and that has insured to Balliol many priceless treasures of association with both Robert and Elizabeth Browning. Up to that time Jowett had not been an admirer of Browning’s poetry. But his keen interest in the theme then engaging Browning was aroused, and he wrote to a friend:

“I thought I was getting too old to make new friends, but I believe that I have made one,—Mr. Browning, the poet, who has been staying with me during the past few days. It is impossible to speak without enthusiasm of his open, generous nature, and his great ability and knowledge. I had no idea that there was a perfectly sensible poet in the world, entirely free from vanity, jealousy, or any other littleness, and thinking no more of himself than if he were an ordinary man. His great energy is very remarkable, as is his determination to make the most of the remainder of life. Of personal objects he seems to have none, except the education of his son, in which I hope in some degree to help him.” [9]

After returning to London, Browning writes to Tennyson, in thanks for a book received from the Laureate: [10]

19, Warwick Crescent, W., Oct. 10, 1865.

My Dear Tennyson,—When I came back last year from my holiday I found a gift from you, a book; this time I find only the blue and gold thing which, such as it is, I send you, you are to take from me. I could not even put in what I pleased but I have said all about it in the word or two of preface, as also that I beg leave to stick the bunch in your buttonhole. May I beg that Mrs. Tennyson will kindly remember me?

Ever Affectionately Yours,

Robert Browning.

Tennyson wrote in reply that the nosegay was very welcome. “I stick it in my buttonhole ... and feel ——’s cork heels added to my boots,” he added.

Volumes of selections from the poems of both Browning and his wife were now being demanded for the “Golden Treasury”; and to Miss Blagden Browning says further that he will certainly do the utmost to make the most of himself before he dies, “for one reason that I may help Pen the better.”

Browning complies with his publisher’s request to prepare a new selection of his wife’s poems. “How I have done it, I can hardly say,” he noted, “but it is one dear delight that the work of her goes on more effectually than ever—her books are more and more read,”—and a new edition of her “Aurora Leigh” was exhausted within a few months.

The winter was a very full and engaging one. On one evening he dined at the deanery of St. Paul’s, Sir John Lubbock and Tennyson being also guests, but the Stanleys, who were invited, were not present. At another dinner the poets met, Tennyson recording: “Mr. Browning gave me an affectionate greeting after all these years,” and Browning writing to a friend: “... I have enjoyed nothing so much as a dinner last week with Tennyson, who with his wife and one son is staying in town for a few weeks, and she is just what she was and always will be, very sweet and dear: he seems to me better than ever. I met him at a large party ... also at Carlyle’s....”

In May of 1866 Browning’s father was in poor health, and on June 14 he died, at his home in Paris, his son having arrived three days before. Although nearly eighty-five years of age, the elder Browning had retained all his clearness of mind, and only just before he passed away he had responded to some question of his son regarding a disputed point in medieval history with “a regular book-full of notes and extracts.” His son speaks of the aged man’s “strange sweetness of soul,” apparently a transmitted trait, for the poet shared it, and has left it in liberal heritage to his son, Robert Barrett Browning, the “Pen” of all these pages. Of his father the poet said:

“He was worthy of being Ba’s father,—out of the whole world, only he, so far as my experience goes. She loved him, and he said very recently, while gazing at her portrait, that only that picture had put into his head that there might be such a thing as the worship of the images of saints.”

Miss Browning came henceforth to live with her brother, and for the remainder of his life she was his constant companion. She was a woman of delightful qualities,—of poise, cheerfulness, of great intelligence and of liberal culture. She was a very discriminating reader, and was peculiarly gifted with that sympathetic comprehension that makes an ideal companionship. Her presence now transformed the London house into a home.

The next summer they passed at Le Croisic, where Browning wrote “Hervé Riel,” in “the most delicious and peculiar old house,” and he and his sister, both very fond of the open air, walked once to Guerande, the old capital of Bretagne, some nine miles from their house.

Browning had received his first academic honors that summer, Oxford having conferred on him her degree of M.A. The next October Browning was made Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, a distinction that he greatly prized.

During this summer Rev. Dr. Phillips Brooks (later Bishop of Massachusetts) was in London, and visited Browning once or twice. To a Boston friend who asked for his impressions of the great poet, Dr. Brooks wrote: [11]

“... I can’t say anything now except that he is one of the nicest people to pass an evening with in London. He is a clear-headed and particularly clear-eyed man of the world, devoted to society, one of the greatest diners-out in London, cordial and hearty, shakes your hand as if he were really glad to see you.... As to his talk it wasn’t ‘Sordello,’ and it wasn’t as fine as ‘Paracelsus,’ but nobody ever talked more nobly, truly, and cheerily than he. I went home and slept after hearing him as one does after a fresh starlight walk with a good cool breeze on his face.”

In 1863, on July 19, a little more than two years after the death of Mrs. Browning, Arabel Barrett had a dream, in which she was speaking with her sister Elizabeth, and asked, “When shall I be with you?” “Dearest, in five years,” was the reply. She told this dream to Mr. Browning, who recorded it at the time. In June of 1868 Miss Barrett died, the time lacking one month only of being the five years. “Only a coincidence, but noticeable,” Mr. Browning wrote to Isa Blagden. But in the larger knowledge that we now have of the nature of life and the phenomena of sleep, that the ethereal body is temporarily released from the physical (sleep being the same as death, save that in the latter the magnetic cord is severed, and the separation is final)—in the light of this larger knowledge it is easy to realize that the two sisters actually met in the ethereal realm, and that the question was asked and answered according to Miss Barrett’s impression. The event was sudden, its immediate cause being rheumatic affection of the heart, and she died in Browning’s arms, as did his wife. Her companionship had been a great comfort to him, and Mr. Gosse notes that for many years after her death he could not bear to pass Delamere Terrace.