E560100B. Poems (1853) and Casa Guidi Windows.
Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, January 1856, pp. 14–20.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 22, 285–291.
It is strange that in this age of song, when even the wrongs that burden, and the mysteries that perplex, our race, are set to music, and when from amidst a host of dawning stars, the critics still look backward, and kneel before those grand orbs in whose sunset glories the past lies sleeping—it is certainly strange that the tide of love and homage, swelling majestically around old land-marks, and babbling, silver-tongued, of rich and new-found shores, should have passed by, in all but silence, a whole world of melody from the lips of one, who, thank God! is still among us, still pouring forth the music of her voice across the dark places of the earth.
It may be that Mrs. Browning has sat too meekly under the shadow of her womanhood; or that her varied lore, gathered alike from classic fount and from the mystic depths of modern minstrelsy, has shed around her name too vast and cold a halo. And yet the picturesque richness, the human-hearted sympathy, and the passionate eloquence of her pen, might well endear her to the inmost heart of any people.
There is, indeed, an occasional obscurity in her language which mars its music—sometimes, doubtless, a struggling effort to interpret the wordless melody of her poet-heart; but too often arising from a love of, though never a laboured search after, abstruse and far-fetched expressions, which appears peculiar to her genius; but it is remarkable that in such passages the misty drapery never dilates that which it veils from us, as is the case in almost all our verbose, though musical modern poetry; and, in lavish profusion throughout her pages, are flights of fancy and bursts of passion, sweet household songs, and wild heart-wailings, in which the most fastidious critic could not detect even this blemish.
It were a hard task to note and illustrate within a limited space the characteristics of her genius; but perhaps she is chiefly remarkable for the strikingly original vein of thought, which is never crushed by the weight of her deep and varied learning; for her prolific imagination, soaring highest in wild and weird imagery; and for her power of expressing passionate anguish, which at times seems absolutely to rock and rend the heart from which it bursts. Of her descriptive talent, and her perfect mastery over melody, every page affords proof. More peculiarly her own than either, is her power, essentially masculine, of condensing [p. 15→] into one terse and vigorous line a whole volume of meaning; and, as essentially feminine, the quaint and dainty delicacy of some of her simpler passages. Of the former, “A Vision of Poets,” and “The Dead Pan,” afford masterly examples. Those grand old singers whom the world has paused to hear, own the spell of the poetess, as did the dead prophet that of Endor’s witch, and, “rising crowned, with sov’reign eyes of depth profound,” loom vast and shadowy through the light of her fancy. A line, a couplet at most, and the shade rises “awful and fair,” before the enchantress. But the whole passage is too long for transcription, and too majestic, in its massive harmony, to be broken into. The same might be said of that glorious Vision of the Gods of Hellas in “The Dead Pan,” of which Miss Mitford remarks, “It were mere pedantry to compare Schiller’s ‘Gods of Greece,’ to this glorious gallery of classic statues, fresh and life-like, as if just struck into beauty by the chisel of Phidias.” Her criticism, felicitous as it is, had been still more so if applied to the sublime shades of the dead poets, for they have all the severe and statuesque grandeur of the marble, while “the Naiads with their drenched locks,” the “Oreads wild”— Juno, with her “regal tread”—blue-eyed Pallas, and golden-haired Apollo—Bacchus, swooning on the panther, and the Loves lying dead by Aphrodite—
As if each had weakly tried,
Once to kiss her as he died;
all these—
Gods bereave’d, gods belated,—
With their purples rent asunder!
Gods discrowned and desecrated,
Disinherited of thunder!
have rather the eloquent colouring of the old masters, than the still intensity of the statue, in their rich and “life-like” beauty.
Of Mrs. Browning’s rare and quaint delicacy of manner, a better instance can scarcely be found than in that exquisitely tuneful little song the “Lay of the early Rose.”
A rose once grew within
A garden April-green,
In her loneness, in her loneness,
And the fairer for that oneness.
A white rose delicate,
On a tall bough and straight!
Early comer, early comer,
Never waiting for the summer.
Her pretty gestes did win
South winds to let her in,
In her loneness, in her loneness,
And the fairer for that oneness;
“For, if I wait,” said she,
“Till time for roses be,—
For the musk-rose and the moss-rose,
Royal-red and maiden-blush rose,—
“What glory then for me
In such a company?—
Roses plenty, roses plenty,
And one nightingale for twenty?
“Nay, let me in,” said she,
“Before the rest are free,—
In my loneness, in my loneness,
All the fairer for that oneness.
“I ween the very skies
Will look down with surprise,
When low on earth they see me,
With my starry aspect dreamy!
“And earth will call her flowers
To hasten out of doors,—
By their curtsies and sweet-smelling,
To give grace to my foretelling.”
“So praying,” who can wonder that the sweet petitioner is admitted; but, alas, for her! missed by the soaring lark, unseen by the nightingale, coldly rained on by the unquiet sky—
“Some word she tried to say—
Some no … ah, well-a-day!
But the passion did o’ercome her,
And the fair frail leaves dropped from her.”
The conclusion of this fanciful little lay, drawing a comparison between the adventurous and ill-fated harbinger of summer, and the consecrated but lonely poet, in advance of his age, adds little to its delicate beauty, though it serves to illustrate one of the oft reiterated articles of our poetess’s creed—the holiness of her own calling, its lofty aims, and the precious and all-sufficient reward it bears within itself, independent of the world’s recognition.
It is in her longest and finest poem, the “Drama of Exile,” that Mrs. Browning is least known, although her varied powers were never more triumphantly displayed; and if in the “Dead Pan” she avowedly excels the “Götter Griechenlands of Schiller,” which first excited her generous emulation, her genius in the “Drama of Exile” assuredly bears her in certain passages, to an equal height with that of Milton—though, while the old man’s sightless orbs are ever turned heaven-ward, her tender eyes are drooping to the earth, and the woman’s foretold sorrow, and our ransom by the “pale pathetic Christ,” shine through her womanly tears.
There is not indeed in the “Drama,” the grand and stately march of Milton’s epic; it is modelled after the Greek tragedy, and its rhythmic measure is frequently broken into, both by the “starry harmonies” of the lamenting angels, and by the weird wails of the newly-cursed earth—yet the creation of Lucifer alone, crowned with his despair, his vast brows seared by the hand of God, and his “glorious darkness” fading dimly away before the wild and plaintive voice of the “morning star”—entitles it to rank very little below “Paradise Lost,” though belonging to a more erratic and passionate school of poetry.
To quote from it as briefly as is necessary is to do injustice to its grandeur as a whole, and yet the temptation is a sore one. Let us glance, for a moment, at the ruined angel, standing “pale in the drear light of his Maker’s curse”:— [p. 16→]
None saith, Stay with me, for thy face is fair!
None saith, Stay with me, for thy voice is sweet!
And yet I was not fashioned out of clay.
Look on me, woman! Am I beautiful?
Thou hast a glorious darkness.
And again:—
Who told thee, Adam?
Thou! The prodigy
Of thy vast brows and melancholy eyes,
Which comprehend the heights of some great fall.
I think that thou hast one day worn a crown
Under the eyes of God.
Or let us listen to the voice most “starry-sweet and strange” of the deserted morning star, “pale-passioned” for his loss:—
Thine angel glory sinks
Down from me, down from me—
My beauty falls, methinks,
Down from thee, down from thee!
O, my light-bearer,
O, my path-preparer,
Gone from me, gone from me!
Ai, ai, Heosphorus!
I cannot kindle underneath the brow
Of this new angel here, who is not Thou:
All things are altered since that time ago—
And if I shine at eve I shall not know—
I am strange—I am slow!
Ai, ai, Heosphorus!
Henceforward, human eyes of lovers be
The only, sweetest sight that I shall see,
With tears between the looks raised up to me.
Ai, ai!
When, having wept all night, at break of day,
Above the folded hills they shall survey
My light, a little trembling, in the gray.
Ai, ai!
And, gazing on me, such shall comprehend—
Through all my piteous pomp at morn or even,
And melancholy leaning out of Heaven—
That love, their own divine, may change or end;
That love may close in loss!
Ai, ai, Heosphorus!
But these rich pages are so teeming with “random and ransomless gems,” that it is bewildering to select from their profusion. Here Eve, who, living one day under “the wings of angels,” wanders the next “beneath a roofless world,” is entreating the compassion of the scornful Earth-spirits:—
O, spirits! by the gentleness ye use,
In winds at night, and floating clouds at noon—
In gliding waters under lilly-leaves—
In chirp of crickets, and the settling hush
A bird makes in her nest, with feet and wings—
Fulfil your natures now!
Here she speaks again:—
I think
That angels—not those guarding Paradise,
But the love angels, who came erst to us,
And when we said “God,” fainted unawares
Back from our mortal presence unto God
(As if He drew them inward in a breath
His name being heard of them)—I think that they,
With sliding voices, lean from heavenly towers,
Invisible, but gracious. Hark—how soft!
Here the angels themselves are recalling their offices in Eden:—
Or, as twilight drifted
Through the cedar masses,
The globed sun we lifted,
Trailing purple, trailing gold,
Out between the passes
Of the mountains, manifold,
To anthems slowly sung!
While he, aweary, and in swoon
For joy to hear our climbing tune
Pierce the faint stars’ concentric rings—
The burden of his glory flung
In broken lights upon our wings.
And here a chorus of the deserted Eden spirits are chaunting “through the thick-shielding and strong-marshalled angels,” who at either side the gate “rise sublimely to the feet of God”:—
Hearken, oh, hearken! ye shall hearken surely,
For years and years,
The noise beside you, dripping coldly, purely,
Of spirits’ tears!
The yearning to a beautiful, denied you,
Shall strain your powers;
Ideal sweetness shall over-glide you,
Resumed from ours!
In all your music our pathetic minor
Your ears shall cross;
And all fair sights shall mind you diviner
With sense of loss!
Amongst a crowd of sublime and solemn figures none is more beautiful than this:—
Eternity stands always fronting God;
A stern colossal image, with blind eyes,
And grand dim lips, that murmur evermore,
God! God! God!
Or the following:—
They wail beloved! they speak of God and glory
And they wail—wail. That burden of the song
Drops from it like its fruit, and heavily falls
Into the lap of silence!
Or this fragment, from the argument Gabriel holds with the angel whom God had “sighed far from him”:—
I do not dream.
This is not heaven, even in a dream; nor earth,
As earth was once—first breathed among the stars—
Articulate glory from the mouth divine,—
To which the myriad spheres thrilled audibly,
Touched like a lute-string—and the sons of God
Said Amen, singing it.
And again:—
I charge thee by the solitude He kept
Ere he created,—leave the earth to God!
I charge thee by the memory of heaven
Ere any sin was done,—leave earth to God!
I charge thee by the choral song we sang,
When up against the white shore of our feet,
The depths of the creation swelled and brake—
I charge thee by that mou[r]nful morning star
Which trembles ....
Hush! I will not hear thee speak
Of such things. Enough spoken. As the pine
In norland forests, drops its weight of snows
By a night’s growth, so, growing towards my ends,
I drop thy counsels. [p. 17→]
In fact, when we listen to the fallen angel taunting Gabriel with the “vacant thrones” in heaven, or, to the passionate despair of our first parents as they fly across the sword-glare—whether we walk the mountains where “the angels stood, and shook from head and wing thick dews of splendour,” or tread the “gray ghast earth” tottering beneath the curse, where “shapes that have no certainty of shape, drift duskly in and out between the pines”—even when we wade through the occasional abstruseness of language, and the frequent profundity of thought—the might of genius bears us onward irresistibly through the wild and troubled melody of this sublime drama.
Mrs. Browning’s minor poems comprise a range of subjects and a choice of metre singularly wide and varied, and in them, as in her longer pieces, we are impressed with the conviction that even culture such as hers has done comparatively little for the poetess, and that her strains, unshackled and untaught, gush spontaneously from her very heart, where the gift of song, with her a gift indeed, lies deeply rooted. It is not merely that the music flows so freely, though the fact of that fine ballad, “The Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” having been thrown off in twelve hours, proves the marvellous ease and rapidity of her pen—it is rather the earnestness, the reality of her effusions, which form their peculiar charm. She never tells us what she fancies she should feel, or what she ought to feel, but what she has felt. From the inner record of her life, blotted, it seems, by not a few tears, she reads, in her pathetic voice: some word, some subtle touch, strikes the master-chord of ours, and its music, very faint, may be, and sad, but always answering faultlessly, wells up from the past and mingles with her own. Nor must it be imagined that she is ever morbidly introspective, after the manner of our present race of poets; her sympathies are wide, deep, and invariably healthy—flowing indeed out of the abundance of her own nature, but lighting up with their tender radiance many a fair, lone nook, many a sad, neglected chamber, in the human heart. The distinction between her strains and those of almost all our young poets lies here—that whereas their luscious and ornate melodies have been fitly designated “a heap of fine things,” the gems of her fancy are strung upon a thread so finely tempered to the needs and sorrows of human nature, that it will vibrate through them, even to our very hearts, let them glitter as they may. To give some idea of her exquisite tenderness take this fragment from the death-song of “Catarina” to her poet-lover, “Camœus”:—
On the door you will not enter
I have gazed too long—adieu!
Hope withdraws her peradventure—
Death is near me—and not you!
Come, O lover,
Close and cover
These poor eyes, you called, I ween,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen.”
When I heard you sing that burden
In my vernal days and bowers,
Other praises disregarding,
I but harkened that of yours—
Only saying
In heart-playing,
“Blessed eyes mine eyes have been
If the s[w]eetest his have seen.”
But all changeth. At this vesper,
Cold the sun shines down the door,
If you stood there would you whisper,
“Love, I love you,” as before—
Death pervading
Now, and shading
Eyes you sang of, that yestreen,
As the sweetest ever seen?
Yes! I think, were you beside them,
Near the bed I die upon—
Though their beauty you denied them,
As you stood there, looking down,
You would truly
Call them duly,
For the love’s sake found therein—
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen.”
But, ah me, you only see me
In your thoughts of loving man,
Smiling soft, perhaps, and dreamy,
Through the wavings of my fan—
And, unweeting,
Go repeating,
In your reverie serene,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen.”
While my spirit leans and reaches
From my body, still and pale,
Fain to hear what tender speech is
In your love to help my vale—
O, my poet,
Come and show it!
Come, of latest love to glean,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen.”
No reply! The fountain’s warble
In the court-yard sounds alone;
As the water to the marble,
So my heart falls with a moan,
From love-sighing,
To this dying!
Death forerunneth love, to win
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen.”
Will you come—when I’m departed,
Where all sweetnesses are hid,
When thy voice, my tender-hearted,
Will not lift up either lid?
Cry, O lover,
Love is over!
Cry beneath the cypress green,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen.”
Keep my riband; take and keep it—
I have loosed it from my hair;
Feeling, while you overweep it,
Not alone in your despair,
Since with saintly
Watch, unfaintly,
Out of heaven shall o’er you lean,
“Sweetest eyes were ever seen!”
Can any, from whom earth has hidden “sweetest eyes that e’er were seen,” read this unmoved?
A yet stronger instance of that which it illustrates, her power of heart-rending, is the “Confessions,” in which she has indeed “cried aloud in her passion”—“sung hoarse, with tears between;” [p. 18→] but, unfortunately, they are too long for quotation here. Marked by the same depth of feeling, though scarcely by the same passion, are “The Cry of the Human,” “Love[d] Once,” “The Mask,” “The Sleep,” and two longer poems, rich in delicate descriptive beauties—the “Poet’s Bow [sic],” and “Isabel’s [sic] Child.” To give a short example of this class, the few verses following are selected from “The Cry of the Children”:—
“True,” say the young children, “it may happen
That we die before our time.
Little Alice died last year—the grave is shapen
Like a snow-ball in the rime.
We looked into the pit prepared to take her—
Was no room for any work in the close clay;
From the sleep wherein she lieth none will wake her,
Crying ‘Get up little Alice! it is day!’
If you listen by that grave in sun and shower,
With your ear down, little Alice never cries.
Could we see her face, be sure we should not know her,
For the smile has time for growing in her eyes,
And merry go her moments, lulled and stilled in
The shroud, by the kirk-chime!
It is good, when it happens,” say the children,
“That we die before our time.”
Alas! alas! the children they are seeking
Death in life, as best to have!
They are binding up their hearts away from breaking
With a cerement from the grave.
Go out, children, from the mine and from the city—
Sing out, children, as the little thrushes do—
Pluck your handfulls of the meadow-cowslips pretty—
Laugh aloud to feel your fingers let them through!
But they answer, “Are your cowslips of the meadows
Like our weeds anear the mine?
Leave us quiet, in the dark of the coal-shadows,
From your pleasures fair and fine!
“For, oh!” say the children, “we are weary,
And we cannot run or leap—
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
To drop down in them and sleep.
Our knees tremble sorely in the stooping—
We fall upon our faces, trying to go;
And, underneath our heavy eyelids, drooping,
The reddest flowers would look as pale as snow.
For all day we drag our burden, tiring,
Through the coal-dark underground—
Or, all day, we drive the wheels of iron
In the factories, round and round.
For, all day, the wheels are droning, turning—
Their wind comes in our faces—
Till our hearts turn, our head with pulses burning,
And the walls turn in their places.
Turns the sky, in the high window, blank and reeling—
Turns the long light that droppeth down the wall—
Turn the black flies that crawl along the ceiling—
All are turning, all the day, and we with all.
And, all day, the iron wheels are droning;
And sometimes we could pray—
“O, ye wheels!” (breaking out in a mad moaning)
“Stop! Be silent for a day!”
Is not this a “cry” from the heart of one agonized at the sight of oppression and suffering, and herself “breaking out in a mad moaning,” which wakes deep echoes in every breast? Such instances of anguished eloquence might be multiplied from these page[s], but their awful reality to us, at least, becomes painful. Let us turn to our poetess’s lighter strains, and to illustrate the versatility of her talents, choose one of the most daintily fanciful, “The House of Clouds”:—
I would build a cloudy house,
For my thoughts to live in,
When for earth too fancy-loose,
And too low for heaven!
. . . . .
Cloud-walls of the morning’s gray,
Faced with amber column—
Crowned with crimson cupola
From a sunset solemn!
May-mists for the casements, fetch,
Pale and glimmering;
With a sunbeam hid in each,
And a smell of spring.
Build a spacious hall thereby;
Boldly, never fearing,
Use the blue space of the sky
Which the wind is clearing;
Branched with corridors sublime,
Flecked with winding stairs—
Such as children wish to climb,
Following their own prayers.
Bring a shadow green and still
From the chestnut forest,
Bring a purple from the hill,
When the heat is sorest;
Spread them out from wall to wall,
Carpet-wove around—
Whereupon the foot shall fall
In light, instead of sound.
Bring a gray cloud from the east,
Where the lark is singing,
Something of the song, at least,
Unlost in the bringing.
That shall be a morning chair,
Poet-dream may sit in,
When it leans out on the air,
Unrhymed and unwritten.
In enumerating Mrs. Browning’s characteristics, we glanced at her descriptive talent, and her command over wild and weird imagery, but did not pause to illustrate either. We must now reluctantly close our quotations from her minor poems, with a few short passages bearing particularly upon these points.
The three following show very fairly how varied is her manner in word-painting—the first, pure and statuesque; the second, rich and melodious; the third, fresh and simple as if dew-drops hung upon the lines, and a spring breeze rustled the pages:—
Motionless she sat:
Her hair had fallen by its weight
On each side of her smile, and lay
Very blackly on the arm
Where the baby nestled warm;
Pale as baby carved in stone
Seen by glimpses of the moon,
Up a dark cathedral aisle:
But, through the storm, no moonbeam fell
Upon the child of Isabel—
Perhaps you saw it by the ray
Alone of her still smile.
Onora, Onora! they heard her not coming—
Not a step on the grass, not a voice through the gloaming!
But her mother looked up, and she stood on the floor,
Fair and still as the moonlight that came there before,
And a smile just beginning. [p. 19→]
It touches her lips—but it dares not arise
To the height of the mystical spheres of her eyes;
And the large musing eyes, neither joyous nor sorry,
Sing on like the angels in separate glory,
Between clouds of amber.
For the hair droops in clouds, amber-coloured, till stirred
Into gold by the gesture that comes with a word;
While—O soft!—her speaking is so interwound
Of the dim and sweet, ’tis a twilight of sound,
And floats through the chamber.
Little Ellie sits alone
’Mid the beeches of a meadow,
By a stream-side on the grass;
And the trees are showering down
Doubles of their leaves in shadow,
On her shining hair and face.
She has thrown her bonnet by;
And her feet she has been dipping
In the shallow water’s flow—
Now she holds them nakedly
In her hands all sleek and dripping
While she rocketh to and fro.
Our poetess seems hardly aware of her power over the supernatural—the sublimely horrible—or at least she uses her weird gift very sparingly; and yet we doubt if in those writers who are most famed for, and most glory in, wild and gloomy creations, a more strikingly powerful passage than the following can be found, of the same length:—
I bear a vow of wicked kind, a vow for mournful cause:
I vowed it deep, I vowed it strong—the spirits laughed applause:
The spirits trailed along the pines low laughter like a breeze,
While, high atween their swinging tops the stars appeared to freeze.
Here again, from the same poem:—
I sate all night beside thee—
The gray owl on the ruined wall shut both his eyes to hide thee;
And ever he flapped his heavy wing, all brokenly and weak,
And the long grass waved against the sky, around his gasping beak.
I sate beside thee all the night, while the moonlight lay forlorn,
Strewn round us like a dead world’s shroud, in ghastly fragments torn.
And through the night, and through the hush, and over the flapping wing,
We heard, beside the heavenly gate, the angels murmuring.
The next and last quotation is rather of a different character—the whole poem from which it is taken breathes a vague horror, which, mingled with its deep pathos, is very remarkable:—
The lady doth not move,
The lady doth not dream;
Yet she seeth her shade no longer laid
In rest upon the stream!
It shaketh without wind;
It parteth from the tide;
It standeth upright in the cleft moonlight,
It sitteth at her side.
Margret, Margret.
. . . . .
It trembled on the grass,
With a low shadowy laughter;
You could see each bird as it woke and stared
Through the shrivelled foliage after.
. . . . .
It trembled on the grass,
With a low shadowy laughter;
And the wind did toll, as a passing soul
Were sped by church-bell after:
And shadows ’stead of light,
Fell from the stars above,
In flakes of darkness on her face
Still bright with trusting love.
Margret, Margret.
Mrs. Browning’s last publication, “Casa Guidi Windows,” was penned in Florence, at that memorable epoch when hearts such as the Countess d’Assoli’s and her own, throbbed high with generous hopes for “that dust of towns and temples which makes Italy.” The first part records her enthusiastic visions of a future, worthy those mighty dead with whose grand graves the land is sown; the second drops from exultant prophecy into a lament, which again brightens into hope towards its conclusion.
Fine as the poem unquestionably is, from its heartfelt sincerity, we marvel much that such earnestness of purpose was not clothed in a simpler and therefore more forcible form. Its intricacy of thought, and obscurity of language, are a perpetual strain upon the reader; and amidst scattered passages of great richness (for it is by no means saturated with the glorious beauty of the land), there is much that can only be called eloquent prose, and much that is simply sensible prose broken abruptly into irregular verse.
The writer of “Crowned and Buried,” might have soared as high, and yet given us her pathos and fire, linked hand in hand with melody; but the metre here is not a particularly musical one, the versification is loose, the rhymes carelessly carried from one canto into another. The specimen following should give our poetess a wholesome horror of abruptly breaking into the meaning of her lines and terminating them with “toos,” “buts,” “fors,” &c.:—
In short, with all the dreams of dreamers young,
Before their heads have tine for slipping off—
The next line certainly says, “Hope’s pillow to the ground;” but such sudden breaks constantly recurring are not elegant, and the effect in this case is, to say the least, peculiar.
Here is another instance, almost as objectionable:—
We all love Italy. Our Italy’s
The darling of the earth.
However, let us pass over these minor points, and to deal generously by the poem, select one or two of its most striking and characteristic passages. Here we have the picturesque Italian populace, pressing through the streets of Florence to the Petti [sic] Palace:—
The very windows, up from door to roof,
Flashed out a rapture of bright heads, to mend
With passionate looks, the gesture’s whirling off
A hurricane of leaves! Three hours did end
While all these passed; and ever in the crowd,
Rude men, unconscious of the tears that kept
Their beards moist, shouted; and some laughed aloud,
And none asked any why they laughed and wept; [p. 20→]
Friends kissed each other’s cheeks, and foes long vowed
Did it more warmly; two-month’s babies leapt
Right upward in their mother’s arms, whose black,
Wide, glittering eyes, looked elsewhere; lovers pressed
Each before either, neither glancing back;
And peasant maidens, smoothly ’tired and tressed,
Forgot to finger on their throats the slack
Great pearl-strings; while old men would not rest,
But pattered with their staves and with their shoes
Still on the stones, and smiled as if they saw.
And here a yet finer picture of the moody Austrian soldiers, marching in an ominous silence through the streets of the unhappy city:—
Then gazing, I beheld the long-drawn street
Live out, from end to end, full in the sun,
With Austria’s thousands. Sword and bayonet,
Horse, foot, artillery,—cannons rolling on,
Like blind, slow storm-clouds, gestant with the heat
Of undeveloped lightnings, each bestrode
By a single man, dust-white from head to heel,
Indifferent as the dreadful thing he rode,
Calm as a sculptured Fate, and terrible!
As some smooth river which hath overflowed
Doth slow and silent down its current wheel
A loosened forest, all the pines erect—
So, swept, in mute significance of storm,
The marshalled thousands.
None will deny the beauty of these selections, albeit we cannot help a little grudging the force and grandeur which is expended upon the dastardly tyrants of Italy—yet strikingly beautiful they are as descriptive passages, and though we would not have a poem, like a chi[l]d’s picture book, made up of such richly-hued illustrations, we may fairly regret that the clear and vivid power with which Mrs. Browning thus records her external impressions, does not extend to the exposition of her aspirations, her hopes and fears.
As in everything she has written, the warm and honest enthusiasm which pervades every line of “Casa Guidi Windows,” is one of its principal charms, and justly, indeed, may we love the songstress, whose deep sympathies, whose exquisite tenderness and heartfelt sincerity, make us forget not only her occasional defects, but even for the moment her mighty genius, and bring us to her feet as to a tender and loving woman. Who so fit as she, we would ask, to chaunt the War-song for which we are waiting? How should we catch through her grand and swelling tones the deep booming of the cannon, and the tramp of the men upon that red eastern soil—now dash into the fierce jaws of death with the glorious “six hundred” of Balaklava—and with what mournful pride, what tearful anguish, bend over the deserted battle-fields, heavy with their awful spoil. She has sung of past glories, she has even lifted her voice in reproach, and when our fallen foe “died of our mercies mid the desert seas,” she told “her England” that—
It was not well, it was not well,
Nor tuneful with thy lofty chaunted part,
Among the Oceanides.
Let her now, when, beneath a woman’s sway, we have once more stood up among the nations, and for the sake of peace, and truth, and right, sent forth our war-cry—let her now tune her mighty lyre anew, and sing us a paen of victory.
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1853.
Casa Guidi Windows (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1851.
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