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

“When I come back from seeing you and think over it all, there is never a least word of yours I could not occupy myself with....”

In a subsequent letter Elizabeth Barrett questions: “Could it be that heart and life were devastated to make room for you? if so it was well done.” And she sends thanks to Browning’s sister, Sarianna, for a copy of Landor’s verses.

And with all these gracious and tenderly exquisite personal matters, the letters are yet brilliant in literary allusion and criticism.

During these three years from 1844 to 1847 were written the greater number of Miss Barrett’s finest lyrics. Those two remarkable poems, “A Rhapsody of Life’s Progress” and “Confessions”; “Loved Once”; “The Sleep” (the poem which was read at her burial in the lovely, cypress-crowned cemetery in Florence, and whose stanzas, set to music, were chanted by the choir in Westminster Abbey when the body of her husband was laid in the “Poets’ Corner”), “The Dead Pan,” and that most exquisite lyric of all, “Catarina to Camoens,” were all written during this period.

The title of the latter was but a transparent veil for her own feelings toward Robert Browning, and had she died in his absence, as Catarina did in that of Camoens, the words would have expressed her own feeling. What profound pathos is in the line,

“Death is near me,—and not you ,”

and how her own infinite sweetness of spirit is mirrored in the stanza,

“I will look out to his future;

I will bless it till it shine,

Should he ever be a suitor

Unto sweeter eyes than mine.”

And read her own self-revelation again in “A Denial,”

“We have met late—it is too late to meet,

O friend, not more than friend!”

But the denial breaks down, and the last lines tell the story:

“Here’s no more courage in my soul to say

‘Look in my face and see.’”

And in that last line of “Insufficiency,”

“I love thee so, Dear, that I only can leave thee.”

In “Question and Answer,” in “Proof and Disproof,” “A Valediction,” “Loved Once,” and “Inclusions,” he who reads between the lines and has the magic of divination may read the story of her inner life.

In the poem “Confessions” is touched a note of mystical, spiritual romance, spiritual tragedy, wholly of the inner life, that entirely differentiates from any other poetic expression of Mrs. Browning. In one stanza occur 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.”

Even with all allowance for the imagination of the poet, these lines reveal such feeling, such tremulous susceptibility, that with less intellectual balance than was hers, combined with such lack of physical vigor, would almost inevitably have resulted in failure of poise. The current of spiritual energy was so strong with Elizabeth Barrett as to largely take the place of greater physical strength. That she never relapsed into the conditions of morbid invalidism is a marvel, and it is also an impressive testimony to the power of spiritual energy to control and determine physical conditions.

All through that summer the letters run on, daily, semi-daily. Of his work Browning writes that he shall be “prouder to begin one day,—may it be soon!—with your hand in mine from the beginning.” Miss Barrett, referring to the Earl of Compton, who is reported from Rome as having achieved some prominence as a painter, proceeds to say:

“People in general would rather be Marquises than Roman artists, consulting their own wishes and inclination. I, for my part, ever since I could speak my mind and knew it, always openly and inwardly preferred the glory of those who live by their heads, to the opposite glory of those who carry other people’s arms. So much for glory. Happiness goes the same way to my fancy. There is something fascinating to me in that Bohemian way of living.... All the conventions of society cut so close and thin, that the soul can see through.... Beyond, above. It is real life as you say ... whether at Rome or elsewhere. I am very glad that you like simplicity in habits of life—it has both reasonableness and sanctity.... I am glad that you—who have had temptation enough, more than enough, I am sure, in every form—have lived in the midst of this London of ours, close to the great social vortex, yet have kept so safe, and free, and calm, and pure from the besetting sins of our society.”

Browning, in one letter, alluding to the prevailing stupidity of the idea that genius and domestic happiness are incompatible, says: “We will live the real answer, will we not?... A man of genius mistreats his wife; well, take away the genius,—does he so instantly improve?”

Of the attitude of his family toward their marriage he writes:

“My family all love you, dearest,—you cannot conceive my father’s and mother’s childlike faith in goodness—and my sister is very high-spirited, and quick of apprehension—so as to seize the true point of the case at once.... Last night I asked my father, who was absorbed over some old book, if he should not be glad to see his new daughter?—to which he, starting, replied, ‘Indeed I shall’; with such a fervor as to make my mother laugh,—not abated by his adding: ‘And how I should be glad of her seeing Sarianna!’”

And she writes:

“Shall we go to Greece, then, Robert? Let us, if you like it. When we have used a little the charm of your Italy,... I should like to see Athens with my living eyes.... Athens was in all the dreams I dreamed, before I knew you. Why should we not see Athens, and Egypt, too, and float down the mystical Nile, and stand in the shadow of the Pyramids? All of it is more possible now, than walking up the street seemed to me last year.”

And he writes that he always felt her “Wine of Cyprus” poem to fill his heart “with unutterable desires.”

To book-lovers the question as to how many books may be taken on a journey, or what volumes, indeed, may be left behind, is a vital one. The reader will smile sympathetically at Miss Barrett’s consultation with Browning as to whether, if they do “achieve the peculiar madness of going to Italy,” they could take any books? And whether it would be well to so arrange that they should not take duplicates? He advises the narrowest compass for luggage. “We can return for what we want, or procure it abroad,” he says, made wise by his two Italian journeys; and he adds:

“I think the fewer books we take the better; they take up room,—and the wise way always seemed to me to read at home, and open one’s eyes and see abroad. A critic somewhere mentioned that as my characteristic—there were two other poets he named placed in novel circumstances ... in a great wood, for instance, Mr. Trench would begin opening books to see how woods were treated ... the other man would set to writing poetry forthwith,—and R. B. would sit still and learn how to write after! A pretty compliment, I thought that. But, seriously, there must be a great library at Pisa (with that University) and abroad they are delighted to facilitate such matters.... I have read in a chamber of the Doges’ palace at Venice painted all over by Tintoretto, walls and ceiling, and at Rome there is a library with a learned priest always kept ready ‘to solve any doubts that may arise.’”

Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett were married on September 12, 1846, in the church of St. Pancras, Marylebone, the only witnesses being his cousin, James Silverthorne, and her maid, Wilson. To have taken her sisters into her confidence would have been to expose them to the fairly insane wrath of her father. “I hate and loathe everything which is clandestine—we both do, Robert and I,” said Mrs. Browning later; but this was the only possible way. Had Mr. Browning spoken to her father in the usual manner, “he would have been forbidden the house without a moment’s scruple,” she explained to a friend; “and I should have been incapacitated from any after exertion by the horrible scenes to which, as a thing of course, I should have been exposed.... I cannot bear some words. In my actual state of physical weakness, it would have been the sacrifice of my whole life—of my convictions, of my affections, and, above all, of what the person dearest to me persisted in calling his life, and the good of it—if I had observed that ‘form.’ Therefore I determined not to observe it, and I consider that in not doing so, I sinned against no duty. That I was constrained to act clandestinely, and did not choose to do so, God is my witness. Also, up to the very last, we stood in the light of day for the whole world, if it please, to judge us. I never saw him out of the Wimpole Street house. He came twice a week to see me, openly in the sight of all.”