curious. “Hawthorne is a man who talks with a pen,” said Story; “he does not open socially to his intimate friends any more than he does to strangers. It isn’t his way to converse.” Mrs. Browning had then just been reading the “Blithedale Romance,” in which she had sought unavailingly, it seems, for some more personal clue to the inner life of its author.
On a brilliant August day the Brownings and the Storys fared forth on a grand excursion on donkey-back, to Benabbia, a hilltown, perched on one of the peaks. Above it on the rocks is a colossal cross, traced by some thunder-bolt of the gods, cut in the solid stone. From this excursion they all returned after dark, in terror of their lives lest the donkeys slip down the sheer precipices; but the scenery was “exquisite, past all beauty.” Mrs. Browning was spell-bound with its marvelous sublimity, as they looked around “on the world of innumerable mountains bound faintly with the gray sea, and not a human habitation.”
Mrs. Browning was then reading the poems of Coventry Patmore, just published, of which Browning had read the manuscript in London in the previous year. The poems of Alexander Smith had also appeared at this time, and in him Mrs. Browning found “an opulence of imagery,” but a defect as to the intellectual part of poetry. With her characteristic tolerance, she instanced his youth in plea of this defect, and said that his images were “flowers thrown to him by the gods, gods beautiful and fragrant, but having no root either in Etna or Olympus.” Enamored, as ever, of novels, she was also reading “Vilette,” which she thought a strong story, though lacking charm, and Mrs. Gaskell’s “Ruth,” which pleased her greatly.
With no dread of death, Mrs. Browning had a horror of the “rust of age,” the touch of age “which is the thickening of the mortal mask between souls. Why talk of age,” she would say, “when we are all young in soul and heart?... Be sure that it’s highly moral to be young as long as possible. Women who dress ‘suitably to their years’ (that is, as hideously as possible) are a disgrace to their sex, aren’t they now?” she would laughingly declare.
This summer in the Apennines at Bagni di Lucca had been a fruitful one to Browning in his poetic work. It became one of constant development, and, as Edmund Gosse points out, “of clarification and increasing selection.” He had already written many of his finest lyrics, “Any Wife to Any Husband,” “The Guardian Angel,” and “Saul”; and in these and succeeding months he produced that miracle of beauty, the poem called “The Flight of the Duchess”; and “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” “The Statue and the Bust,” “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” and “Andrea del Sarto.” To Milsand, Browning wrote that he was at work on lyrics “with more music and painting than before.”
The idyllic summer among the grand chestnut trees came to an end, as summers always do, and October found the Brownings again in Casa Guidi, though preparing to pass the winter in Rome. Verdi had just completed his opera of “Trovatore,” which was performed at the Pergola in Florence, and the poets found it “very passionate and dramatic.”
In November they fared forth for Rome, “an exquisite journey of eight days,” chronicled Mrs. Browning, “seeing the great monastery and triple church of Assisi, and that wonderful passion of waters at Terni.”
It was the picturesque Rome of the popes that still remained in that winter, and the Eternal City was aglow with splendid festivals and processions and with artistic interest. The Brownings caught something of its spirit, even as they came within view of the colossal dome of St. Peter’s, and they entered the city in the highest spirits, “Robert and Penini singing,” related Mrs. Browning, “actually, for the child was radiant and flushed with the continual change of air and scene.” The Storys had engaged an apartment for them, and they found “lighted fires and lamps,” and all comfort.
The Clasped Hands of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Cast in bronze from the model taken by Harriet Hosmer in Rome, 1853.
The original is in the possession of the author.
That winter of 1853-1854 still stands out in the Roman panorama as one of exceptional brilliancy. There was a galaxy of artists,—Story, who had already won fame on two continents; William Page, who believed he had discovered the secret of Titian’s coloring; Crawford, and “young Leighton,” as Mrs. Browning called the future president of the Royal Academy; Gibson, and his brilliant pupil, Harriet Hosmer; Fisher, who painted a portrait of Browning, and also of Penini, for his own use to exhibit in London. It was during this winter that Miss Hosmer took the cast of the “Clasped Hands” of the Brownings, which was put into bronze, and which must always remain a work of the most tender interest. Mrs. Browning was very fond of “Hatty,” as she called her, and in a letter to her Isa she described a pretty scene when Lady Marian Alford, the daughter of the Duke of Northampton, knelt before the girl sculptor and placed on her finger a ring of diamonds surrounding a ruby. Browning’s early friend, M. de Ripert-Monclar, to whom he had dedicated his “Paracelsus,” and Lockhart, were also in Rome; and Leighton was completing his great canvas of Cimabue’s Madonna carried in procession through the streets of Florence.
The Brownings were domiciled in the Bocca di Leone, while the Storys were in the Piazza di Spagna; Thackeray and his two daughters were close at hand, in and out at the Brownings’, with his “talk of glittering dust swept out of salons.” There were Hans Christian Andersen, and Fanny Kemble, with her sister, Mrs. Sartoris, and Lady Oswald, a sister of Lord Elgin. Thackeray’s daughter, Miss Anne Thackeray (now Lady Ritchie), still finds vivid her girlish memory of Mrs. Browning,—“a slight figure in a thin black gown and the unpretentious implements of her magic,” by her sofa, on a little table. Lady Ritchie turns back to her diary of that winter to find in it another of her early impressions of Mrs. Browning, “in soft, falling flounces of black silk, with her heavy curls drooping, and a thin gold chain around her neck.” This chain held a tiny locket of crystal set in coils of gold, which she had worn from childhood, not at all as an ornament, but as a little souvenir. On her death Mr. Browning put into it some of her hair, and gave the treasured relic to Kate Field, from whom it came later into the possession of the writer of this book. Lady Ritchie recalls one memorable evening that season in the salon of Mrs. Sartoris, when the guests assembled in the lofty Roman drawing-room, full of “flowers and light, of comfort and color.” She recalls how the swinging lamps were lighted, shedding a soft glow; how the grand piano stood open, and there was music, and “tables piled with books,” and flowers everywhere. The hostess was in a pearl satin gown with flowing train, and sat by a round table reading aloud from poems of Mr. Browning, when the poet himself was announced, “and as she read, in her wonderful muse-like way, he walked in.” All the lively company were half laughing and half protesting, and Mrs. Kemble, with her regal air, called him to her side, to submit to him some disputed point, which he evaded. Mrs. Sartoris had a story, with which she amused her guests, of a luncheon with the Brownings, somewhere in Italy, where, when she rose to go, and remarked how delightful it had been, and the other guests joined in their expressions of enjoyment, Mr. Browning impulsively exclaimed: “Come back and sup with us, do!” And Mrs. Browning, with the dismay of the housewife, cried: “Oh, Robert, there is no supper, nothing but the remains of the pie.” To which the poet rejoined: “Then come back and finish the pie.”
Mrs. Browning was deeply attached to Fanny Kemble. She describes her, at this time, as “looking magnificent, with her black hair and radiant smile. A very noble creature, indeed,” added Mrs. Browning; “somewhat unelastic, attached to the old modes of thought and convention, but noble in qualities and defects.... Mrs. Sartoris is genial and generous ... and her house has the best society in Rome, and exquisite music, of course.”
Mrs. Browning often joined her husband in excursions to galleries, villas, and ruins; and when in the Sistine Chapel, on a memorable festival, they heard “the wrong Miserere,” she yet found it “very fine, right or wrong, and overcoming in its pathos.” M. Goltz, the Austrian Minister, was an acquaintance whom the Brownings found “witty and agreeable,” and Mrs. Browning called the city “a palimpsest Rome,” with its