E510700E. Prometheus Bound, and Other Poems; Including Sonnets from the Portuguese, Casa Guidi Windows, etc. (New York, 1851).
The Universalist Quarterly, July 1851, pp. 327–328.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 17, 323.
It is needless to say any thing now in praise of Mrs. Browning, as a woman of genius. She has her audience. “The Drama [p. 328→] of Exile,” by which she was first known, has ludicrous and hideous faults, but many of her subsequent pieces more than atone for her sins of imagination and taste, in that work, and give her a prominent place among the foremost writers of England in this century. Her scholarship is wonderful, when we bear in mind against what feeble health she has struggled in her steady pursuit of learning. We cannot judge of the relative fidelity of her version of the Prometheus, but we think there are some striking affinities between her mind and that of the great tragic poet of Athens, which fit her, beyond most translators, to render him into adequate English. “Casa Guidi Windows” contain her reflections on the recent Italian struggle for liberty, and the future probabilities of Italy. Very melancholy most of them are.
Reviewed:
Prometheus Bound, and Other Poems (EBB), New York: C.S. Francis, 1851.
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