The Complete Poetic Works of Robert Browning

PUBLISHERS' NOTE

The Riverside Edition of the Poetic and Dramatic Works of Robert Browning was published first in 1887. It included all the writings which the American publishers had from time to time brought out by arrangement with Mr. Browning or his representatives. A year later the English publishers issued a new and revised edition, whereupon the Riverside Edition was carefully compared with the author's latest revision and made to agree with it. There had grown up, moreover, about the writings a considerable body of comment and interpretation, and to facilitate the study and enjoyment of the poems, the American publishers engaged Mr. George Willis Cooke to prepare a Guide-Book which served as a very desirable accompaniment to the Riverside Edition of the works. They added also to the series, by arrangement with the English publishers, the authorized Life of the poet by Mrs. Sutherland Orr.

The ten volumes thus brought together furnish a complete Browning collection, but it has long been apparent that students and lovers of Browning would find it very convenient to have the complete works of their author in a single portable volume, and the plan of the Cambridge Edition so successfully applied to the poems of Longfellow and Whittier was adopted for this purpose. By a careful study of condensation with every regard for legibility it has been found possible to bring the entire body of Browning's work into a single volume, and to equip the edition with the requisite apparatus. The order of arrangement is chronological, with one or two obvious divergences. As in the other volumes of the Cambridge Edition, a biographical sketch introduces the work, brief head-notes chiefly pertaining to the origin of the respective poems have been supplied, drawn largely from Mr. Cooke's admirable volume, and a small body of pertinent notes of an explanatory character added, though the reader will readily see that the exigencies of the volume have compelled the editor to be very frugal in this respect. The appendix also contains the one notable piece of Browning's prose, a chronological list of his writings, and indexes of titles and first lines.

Boston, 4 Park Street, August 1, 1895.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

[ix]

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

[1]

If one sought to build any genealogical structure to account for Robert Browning's genius, he would find but slight foundation in fact, though what he found would be substantial so far as it went. Browning's father was a bank clerk in London; his father again was a bank clerk. Both of these Brownings were christened Robert. The father of the poet's grandfather was Thomas Browning, an innkeeper and small proprietor in Dorsetshire, and his stock apparently was west-country English. Browning himself liked to believe that an earlier ancestor was a certain Captain Micaiah Browning who raised the siege of Derry in 1689 by an act of personal bravery which cost him his life. It is most to the point that Browning was London born with two generations of city Londoners behind him. His mother was Sarah Anne—a name which became Sarianna in the poet's sister—Wiedemann, the Scottish daughter of a Hamburg German, a shipowner in Dundee.

The characters of the poet's parents are clearly defined. Robert Browning, senior, was a man of business who performed his business duties punctiliously, and by frugality acquired a tolerably comfortable fortune, but he was not a money-making man; his real life was in his books and in the gratification of literary and æsthetic tastes. He was a voracious reader, and in a prudent way a book and print collector. It was his habit, says Mrs. Orr, when he bought a book—which was generally an old one allowing of this addition—to have some pages of blank paper bound into it. These he filled with notes, chronological tables, or such other supplementary matter as would enhance the interest, or assist the mastering, of its contents: all written in a clear and firm, though by no means formal, handwriting. He had a talent for versifying which he used for his entertainment; he had a cheerful nature and that genuine sociability which made him a delightful companion in the small circle which satisfied his simple, ingenuous nature. He was born and bred in the Church of England, but in middle life became by choice a Dissenter, though never an exclusive one.

Mrs. Browning, the poet's mother, was once described by Carlyle as the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman. She inherited from her father a love for music and drawing which in him was manifested in execution, in her in good taste and appreciation. She was a woman of serene, gentle and affectionate nature, and of simple, earnest religious belief. She was brought up in the kirk of Scotland, but, like her husband, connected herself in middle life with the Congregationalists. She communicated of her own religious conviction to her children; it is said that she handed down also a nervous organization.

Of these parents Robert Browning was born in the parish of St. Giles, Camberwell, London, May 7, 1812. He was the oldest of the small family, having two sisters, one, Clara, who died in childhood, and Sarianna, two years younger than himself, who outlived him. The country in which he was born and where he spent his childhood has been delightfully described by his great contemporary, Ruskin, whose Herne Hill was in the immediate neighborhood. Camberwell at that time was a suburb of London, with rural spaces and near access to the open country, though the stony foot of the metropolis was already stepping outward upon the pleasant lanes and fields. There was room for gardening and the keeping of pets, while the country gave opportunity for forays into nature's fastnesses. The boy kept owls and monkeys, magpies and hedgehogs, an eagle, snakes even, and was touched with the collector's pride, as when he started a collection of rare creatures with a couple of lady-birds brought home one winter day and placed in a box lined with cotton[x] wool and labelled, Animals found surviving in the depths of a severe winter. It is easy for a reader of his poems to detect the close, sympathetic observation which he disclosed for all lower life.

Indeed the characteristics of his mind as seen in his writings afterward were readily disclosed in the evidence which remains to us of his boyhood. He was insatiably curious and he was imaginatively dramatic, and he had from the first the sane and generous aid of his parents in both these particulars. His father was passionately fond of children, and gave his own that best of gifts, appreciative companionship. He was fond, says Mr. Sharp in his Life of Browning, of taking the little Robert in his arms and walking to and fro with him in the dusk in 'the library,' soothing the child to sleep by singing to him snatches of Anacreon in the original to a favorite old tune of his, 'A Cottage in a Wood;' and again the same biographer says: One of his own [Robert's] recollections was that of sitting on his father's knees in the library, and listening with enthralled attention to the Tale of Troy, with marvellous illustrations among the glowing coals in the fireplace; with, below all, the vaguely heard accompaniment—from the neighboring room, where Mrs. Browning sat 'in her chief happiness, her hour of darkness and solitude and music'—of a wild Gaelic lament, with its insistent falling cadences.

The boy had an indifferent experience of formal schooling in his youth. The more fertilizing influence of his intellectual taste was found in his father's books. As has been said, his father had an intelligent and cultivated love of books, and eagerly shared his knowledge and his treasures with his boy. A seventeenth century edition of Quarles's Emblems, the first edition of Robinson Crusoe, an early edition of Milton, bought for him by his father, old Bibles, a wide range of Elizabethan literature—these were pastures in which the boy browsed. Besides, he knew the eighteenth century writers, Walpole, Junius, and even Voltaire being included by the catholic minded father. The special acquaintance with Greek came later, but Latin he began early.

His attendance at school ceased when he was fourteen, then came four years of private tutors, and at eighteen he was matriculated at London University, where he spent two years. In this period of private and public tuition, his scope was widening with systematic intent. He learned dancing, riding, boxing and fencing. He became versed in French. He visited galleries, and made some progress in drawing, especially from casts. He studied music with able teachers. He had a strong interest in the stage, and displayed on occasions a good deal of histrionic ability himself.

It is said that in this growing, restless period, when indeed he had the wilfulness and aggressiveness of the young man who has the consciousness of inner power, but not yet the mastery either of art or of himself, it was an open question with him whether he should be poet, painter, sculptor or musician; an artist at any rate he knew he must be. To that all his being moved, and in his youth he manifested that temperament, by alternation dreamy and dramatic, which under favoring conditions is the background from which artistic possibilities are projected. From the vantage ground of a wooded spot near his home he could look out on the distant city lying on the western horizon, and fretting the evening sky with its spires and towers and ragged lines. The sight for him had a great fascination. Here would he lie for hours, looking and dreaming, and he has told how one night of his boyhood he stole out to these elms and saw the great city glimmering through the darkness. After all, the vision was more to him than that which brought woods and fields beneath his ken. It was the world of men and women, toward which his gaze was directed all his life.

In Browning's case, as in that of more than one recent poet, it is possible to see a very distinct passing of the torch into his hand from that of a great predecessor. He had versified from childhood. He would scarcely have been his father's child had he not. His sister remembers that when he was a very little child he would walk round and round the dining-room table, spanning the table with his palm as he marked off the scansion of the verses he had composed. Even before this rhyme had been put into his hands as an instrument, for his father had taught him words by their rhymes, and aided his memorizing of Latin declensions in the same way. So the boy lisped in numbers, for the numbers came, and by the time he was twelve had accumulated a formidable amount of matter, chiefly Byronic in manner. With the confidence of the very youthful poet, he tried to find a publisher who would venture on the issue. He could not find one who would put his verses[xi] into print, but he found one of another sort in his mother, who read them with pride and showed them to her friends. Thus they fell into the hands of Miss Flower, who showed them to her sister, Sarah Flower Adams, whose name is firmly held in hymnologies, and with her appreciation showed them also to the Rev. William Johnson Fox, who as preacher, editor, and man of letters had a tolerably distinct position which has not yet been forgotten. Mr. Fox read and was emphatic in his recognition of promise, but with good sense advised against any attempt to get the book into print. Book it was in manuscript, and this was the publication it received. Like other first ventures, its audience was fit though few, and as will be seen later, Browning gained the best thing that first ventures are likely to bring, a generous critic.

But shortly after this came the real fructifying of the poetic germ which lay in this youthful nature. Passing a bookstall one day, says Mr. Sharp, he saw, in a box of second-hand volumes, a little book advertised as 'Mr. Shelley's Atheistical Poem: very scarce.' He had never heard of Shelley, nor did he learn for a long time that the Dæmon of the World and the miscellaneous poems appended thereto constituted a literary piracy. Badly printed, shamefully mutilated, these discarded blossoms touched him to a new emotion. Pope became further removed than ever: Byron, even, lost his magnetic supremacy. From vague remarks in reply to his inquiries, and from one or two casual allusions, he learned that there really was a poet called Shelley; that he had written several volumes; that, he was dead. His mother set herself to search for more of Shelley for her son, and after recourse to Mr. Fox, made her way to the Olliers in Vere Street, and brought back not only a collection of Shelley's volumes, but of Keats's also, and thus these two poets fell into Browning's hands.

It was on a May night, Browning told a friend, he entered upon this hitherto unknown world. In a laburnum near by, and in a great copper beech not far away, two nightingales sang together. So he sat and listened to them, and read by turns from these two poets. It was his initiation into the same society. He did not at once join them, but when he made his first appearance in public, at the age of twenty, it was with a poem, Pauline, which not only held a glowing apostrophe to Shelley but was throughout colored by his ardent devotion to the poet. Twenty years later he wrote a prose apologia for Shelley in the form of an introduction to a collection of letters purporting to come from Shelley, but which were discovered to be spurious immediately upon publication. Both Pauline and an Essay on Percy Bysshe Shelley will be found in this volume, with introductions explaining the circumstances of publication, but the reader of Browning's poetry is likely to carry longest in his mind the short lyric Memorabilia, beginning:—

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,

in which as in a parable one may read how the sudden acquaintance with this poet was to Browning the one memorable moment in his period of youthful dreaming.

The publication anonymously of Pauline, in January, 1833, was followed by a period of travel. He went to Russia nominally as secretary to the Russian consul-general, and became so enamored of diplomatic life that he essayed to enter it, but failed; so strong a hold did it take on him that he would have been glad in later life if his son had chosen this career.

The life of a poet who is not also a man of action is told mainly in the succession of his writings. Two or three sonnets followed Pauline, but the first poem to which Browning attached his name was Paracelsus, the dedication to which is dated March 15, 1835. The dedication—and the succession of these graceful compliments discloses many of Browning's friendships—was to Count de Ripert-Monclar, a young French royalist, who was a private agent of the royal family, and had become intimate with the poet, who was four years his junior. The count suggested the life of Paracelsus to his friend as a subject for a poem, but on second thought advised against it as offering insufficient materials for the treatment of love. A young poet, however, who would prefix a quotation from Cornelius Agrippa to his first publication was one easily to be enticed by such a subject, and Browning fell upon the literature relating to Paracelsus which he found in the British Museum, and quickly mastered the facts, which became fused by his ardent imagination and eager speculation into a consistent whole. But though he sought his material among hooks, as he needs must, he found his constructive power in the silence of nature in the night. He had a great love for walking in the dark. There was in particular, says Mr. Sharp, a wood near Dulwich,[xii] whither he was wont to go. There he would walk swiftly and eagerly along the solitary and lightless byways, finding a potent stimulus to imaginative thought in the happy isolation thus enjoyed.... At this time, too, he composed much in the open air. This he rarely, if ever, did in later life. Not only many portions of Paracelsus but several scenes in Strafford were enacted first in these midnight silences of the Dulwich woodland. Here, too, as the poet once declared, he came to know the serene beauty of dawn: for every now and again, after having read late, or written long, he would steal quietly from the house, and walk till the morning twilight graded to the pearl and amber of the new day.

Poetry, it may be, more than any other form of literature, clears the way for friendship. At any rate, Paracelsus introduced Browning to John Forster, and it was at this time also that Dickens, Talfourd and Macready, Leigh Hunt, Barry Cornwall, Wordsworth and Landor were more than names to the young poet. There was doubtless something in the man as well as in his work which won him recognition. Macready says he looked more the poet than any man he had ever met. His head was crowned with wavy dark brown hair. He had singularly expressive eyes, a sensitive, mobile mouth, a musical voice, and an alertness of manner, so that he was like a quivering, high bred animal. How marked he was by his companions, and singled out to be, as Macready says, a leading spirit of his time, is instanced by a notable occurrence at Talfourd's house after the first performance of Ion, when Talfourd included Browning with Wordsworth and Landor, who were present, in a toast to the poets of England.

It was on this occasion that Macready, whom Browning already knew well, proposed to the poet that he should write him a play as narrated in the Introduction to Strafford. The play was produced at the Covent Garden Theatre in May, 1837, and Macready and Miss Helen Faucit, afterward Lady Martin, gave distinction to its representation. It came, however, at an unfortunate time in the management, and though it gave promise of a long run, certain difficulties in the theatre compelled its withdrawal. It was published at once by Longmans, but like Browning's former book, was a failure with the public.

The monologue of Pauline had been succeeded by what may be called the conversational drama of Paracelsus, and that by the dramatic Strafford. The form now experimented with was to be the dominant one for the next ten years, though his next attempt was in form almost a reversion to Pauline. During the remainder of 1837 and until Easter, 1838, Browning was engaged on Sordello, but interrupted this poem for a couple of years which have a special interest as the years when he first visited Italy, and when he entered upon an order of production which was to be very significant of his poetic choice of subject and treatment. Browning himself recognized the importance to him of his acquaintance with Italy. It was my university, he was wont to say, when asked if he had been a student at Oxford or Cambridge. The companion poems, The Englishman in Italy and The Italian in England, illustrate that double nationality in Browning's mind by which the two countries were, so to speak, married for him. The latter of these two poems was one which Mazzini used to read to his countrymen when he would demonstrate how generously an Englishman could enter into the Italian's patriotic aspirations. The journey was a rapid one. I went, Browning says, to Trieste, then 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, Munich, Salzburg in Franconia, Frankfort and Mayence; down the Rhine to Cologne, then to Aix-la-Chapelle, Siège and Antwerp; then home.

It would seem as if he had begun Sordello with a bookish knowledge only of Italy, and later charged it with a more informing spirit of love for that country and embroidered it with descriptive scenes drawn from his personal observation. The poem was published in 1840, but the result of the journey in Italy and of the poet's more complete finding of himself—a process by the bye which may almost be taken as having its analogue in Sordello—were made most evident by the next publication, the story of which is told in the Introduction to Pippa Passes. The very form chosen for Bells and Pomegranates was a challenge to the public not so fantastically arrogant as Horne's famous publication of Orion at a farthing, but noticeable as an earnest of Browning's appeal to his generation and not to a select circle of admiring friends. In this series of writings, extending from 1841 through 1846, Browning struck the note again and again, in drama, lyric, and[xiii] romance, which was to be the dominant note of his poetry, that disclosure of the soul of man in all manner of circumstances, as if the world were to the poet a great laboratory of souls, and he was forever to be engaged in solving, dissolving, and resolving the elements.

It is noticeable also that with this series closed Browning's serious attempts at dramatic composition for the stage. It would almost seem as if he finally parted company with theatrical managers, partly because of the constant difficulty he had in making them subordinate to his purpose, partly and no doubt more profoundly because his own genius, bent as it was upon the interpretation of spiritual phenomena, could ill brook the demands of the acted drama that all this interpretation should stop with visible, intelligible, and satisfactory action, capable of histrionic expression. Browning's eager penetration of the arcana of life was too absorbing to permit him to call a halt when the actor on the stage could go no farther.

An example of the practical difficulties he encountered with managers will be found in the vicissitudes of A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, which was put on the stage in 1843 and formed the fifth in the series of Bells and Pomegranates. Browning has himself told the story of his misfortunes so fully and so graphically in a letter to Mr. Frank Hill, editor of the London Daily News, forty years after the event, that it seems worth while to introduce it here. The letter, from which the following passage is taken, was dated 19, Warwick Crescent, December 15, 1884; and was written in consequence of a paragraph concerning the revival of the play, which Mr. Hill had sent in proof to Browning, from a doubt he felt of its accuracy:—

Macready received and accepted the play, while he was engaged at the Haymarket, and retained it for Drury Lane, of which I was ignorant that he was about to become the manager; he accepted it 'at the instigation' of nobody,—and Charles Dickens was not in England when he did so: it was read to him after his return by Forster—and the glowing letter which contains his opinion of it, although directed by him to be shown to myself, was never heard of nor seen by me till printed in Forster's book some thirty years after. When the Drury Lane season began, Macready informed me that he should act the play when he had brought out two others—The Patrician's Daughter, and Plighted Troth. Having done so, he wrote to me that the former had been unsuccessful in money-drawing, and the latter had 'smashed his arrangements altogether,' but he would still produce my play. I had—in my ignorance of certain symptoms better understood by Macready's professional acquaintances—no notion that it was a proper thing, in such a case, to 'release him from his promise;' on the contrary, I should have fancied that such a proposal was offensive. Soon after, Macready begged that I would call on him; he said the play had been read to the actors the day before, and 'laughed at from beginning to end;' on my speaking my mind about this, he explained that the reading had been done by the prompter, a grotesque person with a red nose and wooden leg, ill at ease in the love scenes, and that he would himself make amends by reading the play next morning—which he did, and very adequately—but apprised me that, in consequence of the state of his mind, harassed by business and various trouble, the principal character must be taken by Mr. Phelps; and again I failed to understand—what Forster subsequently assured me was plain as the sun at noonday—that to allow at Macready's theatre any other than Macready to play the principal part in a new piece was suicidal,—and really believed I was meeting his exigencies by accepting the substitution. At the rehearsal, Macready announced that Mr. Phelps was ill, and that he himself would read the part; on the third rehearsal, Mr. Phelps appeared for the first time, and sat in a chair while Macready more than read—rehearsed the part. The next morning Mr. Phelps waylaid me at the stage-floor to say, with much emotion, that it never was intended that he should be instrumental in the success of a new tragedy, and that Macready would play Tresham on the ground that himself, Phelps, was unable to do so. He added that he could not expect me to waive such an advantage, but that, if I were prepared to waive it, 'he would take ether, sit up all night, and have the words in his memory by next day.' I bade him follow me to the green-room, and hear what I decided upon—which was that as Macready had given him the part, he should keep it: this was on a Thursday; he rehearsed on Friday and Saturday,—the play being acted the same evening,—of the fifth day after the 'reading' by Macready. Macready at once wished to reduce the importance of the 'play'—as he styled it in the bills,—tried to leave out so much of the text that I baffled him by getting it printed in four-and-twenty hours, by Moxon's assistance. He wanted me to call it[xiv] The Sister! and I have before me, while I write, the stage-acting copy, with two lines of his own insertion to avoid the tragical ending—Tresham was to announce his intention of going into a monastery! all this, to keep up the belief that Macready, and Macready alone, could produce a veritable 'tragedy,' unproduced before. Not a shilling was spent on scenery or dresses, and a striking scene which had been used for The Patrician's Daughter did duty a second time. If your critic considers this treatment of the play an instance of 'the failure of powerful and experienced actors' to ensure its success, I can only say that my own opinion was shown by at once breaking off a friendship of many years—a friendship which had a right to be plainly and simply told that the play I had contributed as a proof of it would, through a change of circumstances, no longer be to my friend's advantage—all I could possibly care for. Only recently, when by the publication of Macready's journals the extent of his pecuniary embarrassments at that time was made known, could I in a measure understand his motives for such conduct, and less than ever understand why he so strangely disguised and disfigured them. If 'applause' meant success, the play thus maimed and maltreated was successful enough; it 'made way' for Macready's own Benefit, and the theatre closed a fortnight after.

Of the more profound separation between Browning and the theatre, due to the inherent impossibility of his arresting his thought before it got beyond the actor's use, Luria and The Return of the Druses afford good examples, and an illustration might fairly be taken from Colombe's Birthday, which was put on the stage in 1853, but scarcely held its own, though Helen Faucit took the heroine's part, and, when revived forty years after, was so cut and slashed that though the splendid idea of Valence was retained in situation, the delicate, subtle shadows which passed and repassed before the reader's mind were wanting.

The period when Browning was writing his dramas was one of spendthrift enjoyment of life. For it was a time not only of work in the British Museum and of excursions into all sorts of remote fields of literature, but of long rambles, half gypsy experiences, hours when, stretched at full length beneath the sky, he made familiar and minute acquaintance with bird and leaf, insect and snail, the wind in the trees, the search for the northwest passage of argosies of clouds. He pursued all manner of interests which absorbed him for the moment; he was living, in short, that abundant life which was reflected later in multitudinous dramatic assumptions.

Then all at once there came a concentration of his passion and a sudden revelation to him which never lost its wondrous light. Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, knowing each other through their writings, then by a common service to a common friend, then by an intermittent correspondence, finally were brought together by John Kenyon, already a dear friend of each. The fragile creature, scarce able to leave her couch, and the robust, exuberantly vital man, were as far separate in external, superficial agreement as could well be, but each knew the other with an instantaneousness of knowledge and need. Again and again, not only in verses directed openly to his wife, but in those which like By the Fireside thinly veil personal feeling, the passionate constancy of this experimenting, daringly inquisitive poet towards his poet wife is splendidly disclosed, with a certain glory of frank confession which is the vehement sincerity of one who is in this one feeling genuine poet and genuine man.

Miss Barrett was an invalid, guarded with the greatest care, and Browning, in urging marriage upon her, met with all the obstacles which the circumstances raised. He confronted indeed the indomitable refusal of Miss Barrett's father. A physician had held out hopes that a removal to Italy would give the invalid a chance to regain some degree of health, but Mr. Barrett, for some not very clear reason, refused his consent to her taking the journey with her brother. It was then that Browning, who can readily be conceived of as a masterful man, won Miss Barrett's consent to a sudden and clandestine marriage, and a journey to Italy as his wife. When she had finally assented to this course, writes Mrs. Orr, she took a preparatory step which, in so far as it was known, must itself have been sufficiently startling to those about her; she drove to Regent's Park, and when there, stepped out of the carriage and on to the grass. I do not know how long she stood—probably only for a moment; but I well remember hearing that when, after so long an interval, she felt earth under her feet and air about her, the sensation was almost bewilderingly strange.

They were married September 12, 1846. She would not entangle Mr. Kenyon or any of her[xv] friends by announcing even her engagement; she preferred marrying without her father's knowledge, to marrying against his prohibition. For a week the husband and wife did not see each other. Then they met by agreement and went to Paris. Mr. Barrett never forgave his daughter, but the consternation with which the Browning family heard of the event quickly turned to affectionate regard for the frail wife. So far as Mrs. Browning's physical well-being was concerned, it is clear that the marriage gave her a new lease of life; and what seemed at the moment an audacious taking of fate into their own hands proved to be a case where nature obtained her best of both.

From Paris, by slow stages, they passed through France into Italy, and made their first long halt in Pisa. It was here, we are told, that Mrs. Browning showed to her husband in manuscript those Sonnets from the Portuguese which were her offering to him out of the darkness of her chamber. From Pisa they went to Florence, to Ancona, and again back to Florence, where at last they obtained a foothold in the old palace called Casa Guidi, a name to be endeared to the readers of Mrs. Browning's poetry. Mr. George S. Hillard, in his Six Months in Italy, gives a pleasant account of the Brownings when he met them in Florence in 1847.

It is well for the traveller to be chary of names. It is an ungrateful return for hospitable attentions to print the conversation of your host, or describe his person, or give an inventory of his furniture, or proclaim how his wife and daughters were dressed. But I trust I may be pardoned if I state that one of my most delightful associations with Florence arises from the fact that here I made the acquaintance of Robert and Elizabeth Browning. These are even more familiar names in America than in England, and their poetry is probably more read, and better understood with us than among their own countrymen. A happier home and a more perfect union than theirs it is not easy to imagine; and this completeness arises not only from the rare qualities which each possesses, but from their adaptation to each other. Browning's conversation is like the poetry of Chaucer, or like his own, simplified and made transparent. His countenance is so full of vigor, freshness, and refined power, that it seems impossible to think that he can ever grow old. His poetry is subtle, passionate, and profound; but he himself is simple, natural, and playful. He has the repose of a man who has lived much in the open air; with no nervous uneasiness and no unhealthy self-consciousness. Mrs. Browning is in many respects the correlative of her husband. As he is full of manly power, so she is a type of the most sensitive and delicate womanhood. She has been a great sufferer from ill-health, and the marks of pain are stamped upon her person and manner. Her figure is slight, her countenance expressive of genius and sensibility, shaded by a veil of long brown locks; and her tremulous voice often flutters over her words, like the flame of a dying candle over the wick. I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit. She is a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl. Her rare and fine genius needs no setting forth at my hands. She is also, what is not so generally known, a woman of uncommon, nay, profound learning, even measured by a masculine standard. Nor is she more remarkable for genius and learning, than for sweetness of temper, tenderness of heart, depth of feeling, and purity of spirit. It is a privilege to know such beings singly and separately, but to see their powers quickened, and their happiness rounded, by the sacred tie of marriage, is a cause for peculiar and lasting gratitude. A union so complete as theirs—in which the mind has nothing to crave nor the heart to sigh for—is cordial to behold and something to remember.

During the fifteen years of their married life the Brownings lived for the most part in Italy, with occasional summers in England and long sojourns in Paris. The record of Browning's productions during this period is meagre, if one regards the fulness of his poetic activity both before and after. The explanation is made that these new responsibilities,—for two sons were born to them, one of whom died,—carried also great anxieties, for the frailty of Mrs. Browning's health was a constant factor in the movements of the household. But though the record is meagre as to quantity, lovers of Browning's poetry would be likely to regard this as not only a central period, chronologically, but the period when he reached his highest expression. The first collected edition of his poems appeared in 1849, to be followed the next year by Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day, and then, five years after that, in 1855, by Men and Women, a group of poems which still remains the flower of Browning's genius.

[xvi]

The great range taken by these poems is a witness to the fecundity and versatility of Browning's genius. It is possible, also, that to the circumstances of his life, especially its beautiful distractions, we owe the fact of a multitude of short poems rather than longer-sustained efforts. While Mrs. Browning, sheltered by the constant care exerted by her husband and stimulated by his companionship, composed her longest work, Aurora Leigh, he, never long freed from anxious thought, broke into more fragmentary production. A very good illustration of the alacrity of his mind and the instantaneous power of seizing upon opportunity is given in a passage in Mr. Gosse's Personalia:—

In recounting a story of some Tuscan noblemen who had shown him two exquisite miniature-paintings, the work of a young artist who should have received for them the prize in some local contest, and who, being unjustly defrauded, broke his ivories, burned his brushes, and indignantly foreswore the thankless art forever, Mr. Browning suddenly reflected that there was, as he said, 'stuff for a poem' in that story, and immediately with extreme vivacity began to sketch the form it should take, the suppression of what features and the substitution of what others were needful; and finally suggested the non-obvious or inverted moral of the whole, in which the act of spirited defiance was shown to be, really, an act of tame renunciation, the poverty of the artist's spirit being proved in his eagerness to snatch, even though it was by honest merit, a benefit simply material. The poet said, distinctly, that he had never before reflected on this incident as one proper to be versified; the speed, therefore, with which the creative architect laid the foundations, built the main fabric, and even put on the domes and pinnacles of his poem was, no doubt, of uncommon interest. He left it, in five minutes, needing nothing but the mere outward crust of the versification.

It was an incident in Browning's life that when he was producing his most glorious work and receiving the admiration and intelligent appreciation of his poetical wife, he was a very insignificant figure in English literature of the day. Mrs. Browning was indignant over the neglect her husband suffered, and in her letters drew sharp comparison between the attention paid Browning in America and the neglect he received in England. Meanwhile, whether living in Florence or sojourning in Paris or London, a choice company was always to be found welcoming and honoring the two poets. Mr. and Mrs. Story, the Hawthornes, Cardinal Manning, Massimo d'Azeglio, Sir Frederick Leighton, Mr. Odo Russell, Rossetti, Val Prinsep, Forster, Landor, Fanny Kemble,—these are some of the names closely associated with that of the Brownings in this period.

The death of Mrs. Browning, June 29, 1861, closed this most beautiful human companionship. It made also a great change in Browning's habit of life, and no doubt affected in important ways his poetical productiveness. He left Italy for England. He became absorbed, so far as personal responsibilities went, in the education of his son. By some strange caprice, he chose to make his home in an ugly part of London, and he approached it through a region of disorder and squalor. But he also, with his robust nature, denied himself the luxury of a persistent solitariness, and little by little returned to society, especially grateful for the friendship of women like Miss Isa Blagden, who stepped in at the moment of his descent into the valley of grief with their gentle ministrations.

The months that followed Mrs. Browning's death were in a way given to taking up again dropped threads of work, and to intellectual occupations, which both satisfied and stimulated his nature. He read Euripides again, perhaps in part because of the association in his mind with his wife's scholarly interests. He resumed the poems on which he had been engaged in the last months at Casa Guidi, and he pondered over his magnum opus, the germ of which had been in his mind for many months. But first, in 1863, he saw through the press a new and complete collection of his poetical works in three volumes. Then, the year following, he gathered the poems which immediately preceded and followed Mrs. Browning's death into the volume of Dramatis Personæ. The reissue of his older poems and this new accession were accompanied by a clear re-enforcement of his position as an English poet. He had come, too, to the point where volumes of selections from his work were in demand, a pretty good sign of a widening of his audience. Other signs followed. In 1867 he received the honorary degree of M. A. from the University of Oxford, and a few months later was made honorary fellow of Balliol College. In the year following he[xvii] was asked to stand for the Lord Rectorship of the University of St. Andrews, rendered vacant by the death of J. S. Mill.

His mother had died in 1849, and in 1866 his father, who had been one of his most constant companions since his wife's death, died also. Thereafter, he and his sister Sarianna, who had passed a life of devotion to their parents, became inseparable. Though England was their home, they spent many summers in Brittany, as his poems indicate, and now and then returned to Italy, where his son was established finally as a painter.

In 1868 appeared the six volume uniform edition of his poems, and immediately afterward began the publication, to be completed in four volumes, of The Ring and the Book. Mrs. Orr traces, in an ingenious manner, the influence which Mrs. Browning's personality had in the conception of Pompilia in this poem. However much a single character may have been affected, it is easy to believe that this elaborate construction building in Browning's mind during the closing years of his wife's life and actually brought into existence in the years immediately following was, more than any single work, a great monument which the poet raised to the memory of that companion whose own poetic achievement always seemed to him of a higher worth than his own. The simple truth is, he wrote to a common friend, that she was the poet and I the clever person by comparison: remember her limited experience of all kinds, and what she made of it. Remember, on the other hand, how my uninterrupted health and strength and practice with the world have helped me.

After The Ring and the Book the only new departure, so to speak, of Browning's genius was in the group of poems which were built upon the foundation of Greek poetry. In 1871 appeared Balaustion's Adventure, in 1875 Aristophanes' Apology, and in 1877 The Agamemnon of Æschylus. They have their value as expressive of Browning's catholicity, and more particularly as his one great literary feat. With all his interest in Italy, and his delving in Renaissance literature, there can scarcely be said to be any criticism of Italian literature in the form of his own poetry. In like manner his dramatic works are not, except in a very remote or general sense, criticism of the Elizabethan drama. But his three poems above named do represent the thought and criticism of a Gothic mind confronting and admiring the Greek art and thought. Browning in these works is not a reproducer in his own terms of Greek life; he is a poet of varied experience, who, coming in contact with a great and distinct manifestation of human life, is moved to strike in here also with his thought and fancy, and because of the very elemental nature of the material, to find the keenest delight in exercising his genius upon it.

Meanwhile the facility which his long and varied practice with the English language had brought him made every new subject that appealed to him a plaything for his fertile imagination; and the speculative temper which grew upon him as the maturity of experience enlarged and enriched his material for thought, led him into long and tortuous ways. The Ring and the Book stands about midway in the bulk of his work, but whereas all the poetry and drama before that work represent thirty-five years of his life, that which follows, nearly as great in amount, represents but twenty years.

In these last years of his life, when fame had come to him and his versatility made him a ready companion, he led a semi-public life. He was in demand in all directions. As Mr. Sharp has rapidly summed it up: Everybody wished him to come and dine; and he did his utmost to gratify everybody. He said everything; read all the notable books; kept himself acquainted with the leading contents of the journals and magazines; conducted a large correspondence; read new French, German, and Italian books of mark; read and translated Euripides and Æschylus; knew all the gossip of the literary clubs, salons, and the studios; was a frequenter of afternoon-tea parties; and then, over and above it, he was Browning: the most profoundly subtle mind that has exercised itself in poetry since Shakespeare.

In 1881 was founded the English Browning Society, one of the most singular testimonials to the interest awakened by a contemporaneous poet known in literary history. The great mass of his writings, the recondite nature of some of the material which he had used, but more than all, the astounding variety of problems in human life and character which he had presented and either solved or opened the way to solve, made Browning an object of the greatest interest to the curious, the sympathetic, and the restless of his day. Any such movement has on its edge a frayed[xviii] sort of membership, but no one can note the names of members or read the communications which appear in the society's proceedings without recognizing the intellectual ability that carried the movement along. Browning's own attitude toward the society is pretty clearly expressed in the following words which he wrote to Mr. Edmund Yates at the time of the society's foundation:—

The Browning Society, I need not say, as well as Browning himself, are fair game for criticism. I had no more to do with the founding it than the babe unborn; and, as Wilkes was no Wilkesite, I am quite other than a Browningite. But I cannot wish harm to a society of, with a few exceptions, names unknown to me, who are busied about my books so disinterestedly. The exaggerations probably come of the fifty-years'-long charge of unintelligibility against my books; such reactions are possible, though I never looked for the beginning of one so soon. That there is a grotesque side to the thing is certain; but I have been surprised and touched by what cannot but have been well intentioned, I think. Anyhow, as I never felt inconvenienced by hard words, you will not expect me to wax bumptious because of undue compliment: so enough of 'Browning'—except that he is yours very truly 'while the machine is to him.'

In 1887 Browning removed to a more agreeable quarter in De Vere Gardens in the west end of London, and with his affection for Asolo, he set about purchasing a residence there in 1889, and it was while engaged in negotiations for the purchase that he was taken ill with bronchial troubles, and died at his son's home in Venice, December 12, 1889. He was buried in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, on the last day of the year. Italy rightly divided honors with England, and on the outer wall of the Rezzonico Palace in Venice is a memorial tablet with the inscription:—

A

Roberto Browning

morto in questo palazzo

il 12 Dicembre 1889

Venezia

pose

Below, in the corner, are placed two lines from his poem, De Gustibus:—

"Open my heart and you will see

Graved inside of it, 'Italy.'"

H. E. S.

[1]

PAULINE: THE FRAGMENT OF A CONFESSION

The history of the earliest printed of Browning's writings is so curious that it seems worth while to give it at greater length than its intrinsic merit would require. As a boy Browning wrote an inordinate amount of verse, imitative largely of Byron, and some of it written when he was twelve struck his father as good enough to deserve printing, but no publisher could be found ready to confirm this faith. Then Browning fell into a Shelleyan mood, and when he was twenty projected a great work of which the introduction only was written. This introduction was Pauline, which to be precise was completed October 22, 1832. Browning's aunt volunteered to pay the expenses of publication, and it was published anonymously early in 1833 by Saunders & Otley. The most authoritative person on literary matters in the young poet's circle of friends was the Rev. William Johnson Fox, a Unitarian clergyman and editor of the Monthly Repository. He had a few years before given emphatic commendation to the boy's verse, and now reviewed the poem with great warmth in his own magazine, so winning the poet's gratitude as to draw from him the extravagant expression: I shall never write a line without thinking of the source of my first praise, be assured. The poem missed what would have been from its writer a more notable review. Mr. John Stuart Mill, six years Browning's senior, was so delighted with Pauline that he wrote to the editor of Tait's Magazine, the only periodical in which he could write freely, asking leave to review the poem. The editor replied that he had just printed a curt, contemptuous notice, and could not at once take the other track. When Mill died his copy of Pauline, crowded with annotations, fell into Browning's hands and may now be seen in the South Kensington Museum.

In spite of such hopeful promise the poem was still-born from the press. Five years later, Browning wrote in a copy the only remaining crab of the shapely Tree of Life in my Fool's Paradise. He appears never to have spoken of it until a striking circumstance brought it again into light. Many years after it was printed Dante Gabriel Rossetti was browsing among the volumes of forgotten poetry in the British Museum. He came upon a book in which a number of pamphlet poems were bound in a heterogeneous collection. Among these was Pauline. He read it, and from its internal evidence was convinced that it was an unacknowledged poem of Browning's. The book was wholly out of print, and he made a copy of it. He wrote to Browning afterwards taxing the poet with the production, and Browning, greatly surprised at Rossetti's discovery, acknowledged the authorship. In 1865, the editor of this Cambridge edition, meeting Rossetti in London, mentioned the fact that he had been copying at the British Museum Browning's prose introduction to the suppressed spurious collection of Shelley's Letters, whereupon Rossetti told him of this other rare book. Afterwards on learning that he had copied Pauline also he said: I suppose you will print it when you go back to America. By no means, replied the editor; that would be a breach of faith. I copied it as a student of Browning. I never would make it public without Browning's consent. A year or two later therefore when a new edition of the collected poems was published, he thought himself not unlikely the unwitting occasion of the inclusion of Pauline, for in the introduction Browning wrote as follows:

"The first piece in the series (Pauline), I acknowledge and retain with extreme repugnance, indeed purely of necessity; for not long ago I inspected one, and am certified of the existence of other transcripts, intended sooner or later to be published abroad: by forestalling these, I can at least correct some misprints (no syllable is changed) and introduce a boyish work by an exculpatory word. The thing was my earliest attempt at