Mrs. Browning drove with her maid to the home of Mr. Boyd, resting there, as if making a morning call on a familiar friend, until joined by her sisters, who took her for a little drive on Hampstead Heath. For five days she remained in her father’s house, and during this time Browning could not bring himself to call and ask for his wife as “Miss Barrett,” so they arranged all the details of their journey by letter. On September 19 they left for Paris, and the last one of these immortal letters, written the evening before their departure, from Mrs. Browning to her husband, contains these words:
“By to-morrow at this time I shall have you, only, to love me, my beloved! You, only! As if one said, God, only! And we shall have Him beside, I pray of Him!”
With her maid, Mrs. Browning walked out of her father’s house the next day, meeting her husband at a bookseller’s around the corner of the street, and they drove to the station, leaving for Southampton to catch the night boat to Havre.
Never could the world have understood the ineffable love and beauty and nobleness of the characters of both Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, had these letters been withheld from the public. Quite aside from the deeper interest of their personal revelation,—the revelation of such nobleness and such perfect mutual comprehension and tenderness of sympathy as are here revealed,—the pages are full of interesting literary allusion and comment, of wit, repartee, and of charm that defies analysis. It was a wise and generous gift when the son of the poets, Robert Barrett Browning, gave these wonderful letters to the reading public. The supreme test of literature is that which contributes to the spiritual wealth of the world. Measured by this standard, these are of the highest literary order. No one can fail to realize how all that is noblest in manhood, all that is holiest in womanhood, is revealed in this correspondence.
Edmund Clarence Stedman, after reading these letters, said: “It would have been almost a crime to have permitted this wonderful, exceptional interchange of soul and mind, between these two strong, ‘excepted’ beings, to leave no trace forever.”
Robert Barrett Browning, in referring to his publication of this correspondence in a conversation with the writer of this volume, remarked that he really had no choice in the matter, as the Apochryphal legends and myths and improvisations that had even then begun to weave themselves about the remarkable and unusual story of the acquaintance, courtship, and marriage of his parents, could only be dissipated by the simple truth, as revealed in their own letters.
Their love took its place in the spiritual order; it was a bond that made itself the mystic force in their mutual development and achievement; and of which the woman, whose reverence for the Divine Life was the strongest element in her nature, could yet say,—
“And I, who looked for only God, found thee!”
Life, as well as Literature, would have been the poorer had not Mr. Barrett Browning so wisely and generously enriched both by the publication of this correspondence.
Not the least among the beautiful expressions that have been made by those spirits so touched to fine issues as to enter into the spiritual loveliness of these letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, is a sonnet by a New England poet, Rev. William Brunton,—a poet who “died too soon,” but whose love for the poetry of the Brownings was as ardent as it was finely appreciative:
“Oh! dear departed saints of highest song,
Behind the screen of time your love lay hid,
Its fair unfoldment was in life forbid—
As doing such divine affection wrong,
But now we read with interest deep and strong,
And lift from off the magic jar the lid,
And lo! your spirit stands the clouds amid
And speaks to us in some superior tongue!
“Devotion such as yours is heavenly-wise,
And yet the possible of earth ye show;
Ye dwellers in the blue of summer skies,
Through you a finer love of love we know;
It is as if the angels moved with men,
And key of Paradise were found again!”
CHAPTER VI
1846-1850
“And on her lover’s arm she leant
And round her waist she felt it fold,
And far across the hills they went
To that new world which is the old.
Across the hills, and far away,
Beyond their utmost purple rim,
Beyond the night, beyond the day,
Through all the world she followed him.”
Marriage and Italy—“In that New World”—The Haunts of Petrarca—The Magic Land—In Pisa—Vallombrosa—“Un Bel Giro”—Guercino’s Angel—Casa Guidi—Birth of Robert Barrett Browning—Bagni di Lucca—“Sonnets from the Portuguese”—The Enchantment of Italy.
Paris, “and such a strange week it was,” wrote Mrs. Browning to Miss Mitford; “whether in the body, or out of the body, I can scarcely tell. Our Balzac should be flattered beyond measure by my even thinking of him at all.” The journey from London to Paris was not then quite the swift and easy affair it now is, the railroad between Paris and Havre not being then completed beyond Rouen; still, such an elixir of life is happiness that Mrs. Browning arrived in the French Capital feeling much better than when she left London. Mrs. Jameson had only recently taken leave of Miss Barrett on her sofa, and sympathetically offered to take her to Italy herself for the winter with her niece; Miss Barrett had replied: “Not only am I grateful to you, but happy to be grateful to you,” but she had given no hint of the impending marriage. Mrs. Jameson’s surprise, on receiving a note from Mrs. Browning, saying she was in Paris, was so great that her niece, Geraldine Bate (afterward Mrs. MacPherson of Rome), asserted that her aunt’s amazement was “almost comical.” Mrs. Jameson lost no time in persuading the Brownings to join her and her niece at their quiet pension in the Rue Ville l’Eveque, where they remained for a week,—this “strange week” to Mrs. Browning.
In Paris they visited the galleries of the Louvre, but did little sight-seeing beyond, “being satisfied with the idea of Paris,” she said.
To a friend Mrs. Jameson wrote:
“I have also here a poet and a poetess—two celebrities who have run away and married under circumstances peculiarly interesting, and such as render imprudence the height of prudence. Both excellent; but God help them! for I know not how the two poet heads and poet hearts will get on through this prosaic world.”
As for ways and means, however, the Brownings were sufficiently provided. He had a modest independence, and she also had in her own right a little fortune of some forty thousand pounds, yielding three or four hundred pounds a year; but in the July preceding their marriage Browning, with his sensitive honor, insisted upon her making a will bequeathing this capital to her own family. In a letter to him dated July 27 of that summer the story of his insistence on this is revealed in her own words: “I will write the paper as you bid me.... You are noble in all things ... but I will not discuss it so as to tease you.... I send you the paper therefore, to that end, and only to that end....” The “document,” by Browning’s insistence, gave her property to her two sisters, in equal division, or, in case of their death, to the surviving brothers. Nothing less than this would satisfy Robert Browning.
Meantime, there was the natural London comment. Wordsworth observed: “So Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett have gone off together! It is to be hoped they can understand each other, for no one else can.”
Mr.