E561126A. Aurora Leigh.
The Daily News, 26 November 1856, p. 2.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 289–294.
Mrs. Browning has until now been occupied like a great musician who plays a succession of brilliant preludes preparatory to bursting into the magnificent storm of harmony which is to embody the whole of his conceptions. Having tested by these efforts the range of her powers, she now employs them in a work worthy of them. If she had not produced “Aurora Leigh,” we should still have recognised her as an exquisite lyrical poet, combining, in a degree almost unexampled, profundity of thought and extent of learning; but we should not have known that she possessed that disciplined energy, that unflagging imagination, which were necessary for the composition of the greatest poem ever written by woman. She may now without presumption take her stand amidst the most illustrious of those who have expressed high and holy thoughts in the music of verse. The most ill natured of her critics, the most unsympathetic of her readers, will not hesitate to confess, however he may dislike the form in which this book is cast, however he may disagree with the author’s sentiments, however he may blame certain peculiarities in the composition, that “Aurora Leigh” contains evidences of poetic power never to be met with except in the master works of the highest order of genius.
Of course there will be a large number of opponents to the book, taking different grounds of objection. Those who believe that the functions of women are to be limited to perpetuating the race, and keeping the keys, will find fault with the heroine, expressing the bitterness of their contempt for “Aurora Leigh,” by calling her “a strong-minded woman.” Those who think that the proper dignity of a poem is only to be preserved by maintaining a flat level of what they are pleased to call poetic diction, will find fault with some colloquialisms, which give their sense of genteel expression a shock. Some will exercise their criticism on the form of the work, and consider they have said something very severe when they term it a novel in verse. The writer of the poem will know how to estimate these criticisms and others at their proper value, secure in the belief that great artists will never be properly appreciated until they have themselves taught people how to appreciate them.
Aurora Leigh is the daughter of an Englishman by an Italian mother. She loses her mother in infancy, and her education is conducted by her father, who knows no other way of bringing her up than endeavouring to make her a book-worm like himself. He dies when she is thirteen, and the orphan is then taken to England and entrusted to the care of her father’s maiden sister, a rigid matter-of-fact unsympathetic woman, prepared to dislike her niece on account of her Italian mother. The father had given such offence by his marriage that he had been disinherited, and the property which should have been his, left to Aurora’s cousin, Romney Leigh. Romney, in process of time, falls in love with his cousin and asks her to become his wife. Something in the manner of his request gives her the impression that he does not reverence women, as she ought to be reverenced, and that he wishes to marry her from motives in which compassion holds a prominent place. She refuses him, much to the discomfiture of her aunt, who soon after dies. Romney then comes with offers of assistance, which Aurora spurns. She goes to London, and after a time succeeds in establishing a reputation as a poetess. Romney, after his rejection by his cousin, devotes himself entirely to works of practical benevolence. He considers the distinction between classes as unholy, and is for ever labouring to break it down. He bears the strongest testimony to the sincerity of his principles by engaging himself to be married to Marian Erle, a working semptress, sprung from, and living amongst, the dregs of the people. On the day appointed for the marriage, when the church is crowded with rich and poor, to witness the strange spectacle of the union between nobility and pauperism, Marian is not to be found. She has been made to believe by a certain Lady Waldemar, herself in love with Romney, that by marrying the latter she would only assure his misery. Marian is sent away under care of a degraded woman, who is supplied with money by Lady Waldemar, to pay her passage to the colonies. The woman basely betrays her charge, and Marian is forced unwillingly into infamy. Lady Waldemar in the mean time pretends to fall in with Romney’s views, assisting him in his schemes of practical benevolence. Aurora, on hearing a report of their approaching marriage, begins to feel the passion stirring within her that had only slumbered, and determines to leave England. On her way to Italy she stays for a short time in Paris, where she meets with Marian Erle, who tells her the reasons that had induced her to give up Romney. Aurora on this writes the latter an account of Lady Waldemar’s perfidy, to prevent the marriage if possible, and departs with Marian Erle and her child to Florence. As she receives no reply from England she believes the marriage has taken place. She is undeceived by Romney himself, who has followed her to Florence with the intention of fulfilling his promise to Marian. Misfortune has fallen upon him. Leigh Hall has been burned down by the very beings he has laboured to benefit, and he has been blinded in the conflagration. Marian refuses to marry Romney, on the grounds that she never loved him as he ought to have been loved, that she does not love him at all now, and that Aurora is the person most fitted to become his bride. Romney and Aurora then enter into mutual explanations. The love on both sides is confessed. Each has lived in some sense an isolated life—a life occupied with single aims which each considered sufficient for duty and happiness. Aurora finds that a passionate devotion to art, either for its own sake or for that of the world, is not enough to fulfil the measure of that which we owe to God or his creatures. Romney comes to a similar conclusion. The tale terminates with their union.
This rapid enumeration of the principal events conveys no better idea of the poem than the scaffolding which serves for the erection of a palace conveys of the palace itself, triumphant in the glories of its architecture and the gorgeous splendour of its decorations. Still it was necessary as an introduction to our remarks. One main beauty of the work consists in the manner in which it explains itself, in the marvellous fulness of vitality in the principal characters, in the astonishing power of subtle mental analysis, in the art which fuses incidents almost abruptly startling into a faultless unity. It distinguishes itself by a great human interest. We scarcely ever lose perception of the large throbbings of passion, except when we follow with absorbed attention the eloquent exposition of a great truth. Aurora Leigh, the woman and the artist, lays her whole soul and intellect bare before you. Heart and brain are both exposed to view—the surgings of feeling no less than the developments of thought. No doubt this will, in certain quarters, be objected to. The vice of modern poetry is said to consist in its excessive subjectiveness. Poets are accused of continually analysing their own thoughts, subtilly tracking their own sentiments to their sources, morbidly reflecting on their own mental phenomena. Now, as far as all this is morbid it is of course bad, but there is no necessity that it should be morbid. We are thoroughly opposed to the doctrine that poetry should always be objective, that the description of a state of consciousness is less fitted for poetry than the description of a state of warfare, that the contest between the good and evil elements in man’s nature is less capable of being brought into the service of poetry than a struggle between a moss-trooper and his enemy. In an age when thinking upon thought is so prevalent, it is necessary that poetry should be subjective. What poems are more thoroughly subjective than the Psalms of David? What more intensely personal? But are they less poetical than Homer’s Iliad or a border ballad? Bad subjective poetry, like bad objective poetry, is not to be reprobated because it is either subjective or objective, but only because it is bad.
Mrs. Browning brings the broad blaze of imagination to bear upon the phenomena of internal consciousness with the same power that the old poets did upon the appearances of the external world, and like them she discovers truths which the ordinary observer never dreams of. For the imagination in poets is not what so many take it to be, a faculty of creation, but a faculty of insight. It is because poets see more deeply than others that they describe more accurately. And hence it comes to pass that imaginative poets and painters are able to tell us more about ourselves and the world than we knew before. We go out from the perusal of their works with new senses for beauty and truth. We have before stared vacantly upon man and nature, and they lift up the veil that hid the beauty and truth essentially belonging to nature and to man. Hear Aurora Leigh on this subject:
I write so
Of the only truth tellers, now left to God—
The only speakers of essential truth,
Opposed to relative, comparative,
And temporal truths; the only holders by
His sun skirts, through conventional gray glooms;
The only teachers who instruct mankind,
From just a shadow or a charnel-wall,
To find man’s veritable stature out,
Erect, sublime—the measure of a man,
And that’s the measure of an angel, says
The Apostle. Ay, and while your common men
Build pyramids, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine,
And dust the flaunty carpets of the world
For kings to walk on, or our senators,
The poet suddenly will catch them up
With his voice like a thunder .. “This is soul,
This is life, this word is being said in heaven,
Here’s God down on us! what are you about?”
How all those workers start amid their work,
Look round, look up, and feel, a moment’s space,
That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade,
Is not the imperative labour after all.
Observe how keenly this extra sense of sight which distinguishes the poet is displayed in the following extract. It describes a mere common occurrence, a sort of incident which happens every day, but which is shown by the poet to contain far more in it than is seen by your common observer. It describes Aurora’s first meeting with her aunt:
A moment, she seemed moved,
Kissed me with cold lips, suffered me to cling,
And draw me feebly through the hall, into
The room she sate in.
There, with some strange spasm
Of pain and passion, she wrung loose my hands
Imperiously, and held me at arm’s length,
And with two grey-steel naked-bladed eyes
Searched through my face,—ay, stabbed it through and through,
Through brows and cheeks and chin, as if to find
A wicked murderer in my innocent face,
If not here, there perhaps. Then, drawing breath,
She struggled for her ordinary calm,
And missed it rather,—told me not to shrink,
As if she had told me not to lie or swear,—
“She loved my father, and would love me too
As long as I deserved it.” Very kind.
We should like to have quoted largely from the whole account of the aunt, which is full of bold, sharp, pungent description. But we must limit ourselves to such extracts as will best give an idea of the magnificent filling up which clothes with beauty the bare skeleton of facts in which we have attempted to convey the outline of the story. The following is a portion of the reply which Aurora gives to Romney when he offers her his hand. It gives her idea of the function of the artist:
Ah, you force me, sir,
To be over-bold in speaking of myself,—
I, too, have my vocation,—work to do,
The heavens and earth have set me, since I changed
My father’s face for theirs,—and, though your world
Were twice as wretched as you represent,
Most serious work, most necessary work,
As any of the economists’. Reform,
Make trade a Christian possibility,
And individual right no general wrong;
Wipe out earth’s furrows of the Thine and Mine,
And leave one green, for men to play at bowls,
With innings for them all! .. what then, indeed,
If mortals were not greater by the head
Than any of their prosperities? what then,
Unless the artist keep up open roads
Betwixt the seen and unseen,—bursting through
The best of your conventions with his best,
The speakable, imaginable best
God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond
Both speech and imagination? A starved man
Exceeds a fat beast: we’ll not barter, sir,
The beautiful for barley.—And, even so,
I hold you will not compass your poor ends
Of barley feeding and material ease,
Without a poet’s individualism
To work your universal. It takes a soul
To move a body: it takes a high-souled man
To move the masses .. even to a cleaner stye:
It takes the ideal to blow a hair’s breadth off
The dust of the actual.—Ah, your Fouriers failed,
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within——For me,
Perhaps I am not worthy, as you say,
Of work like this; .. perhaps a woman’s soul
Aspires, and not creates! yet we aspire,
And yet I’ll try out your perhapses, sir;
And if I fail .. why, burn me up my straw
Like other false works—I’ll not ask for grace,
Your scorn is better, cousin Romney. I
Who love my art, would never wish it lower
To suit my stature. I may love my art.
You’ll grant that even a woman may love art,
Seeing that to waste true love on anything
Is womanly, past question.
She works at first with constant power and variable success.
Day and night
I worked my r[h]ythmic thought, and furrowed up
Both watch and slumber with long lines of life
Which did not suit their season. The rose fell
From either cheek, my eyes globed luminous
Through orbits of blue shadow, and my pulse
Would shudder along the purple-voiced wrist
Like a shot bird.
I worked on, on.
Through all the bristling fence of nights and days
Which hedges time in from the eternities,
I struggled, .. never stopped to note the stakes
Which hurt me in my course. The midnight oil
Would stink sometimes; there came some vulgar needs:
I had to live, that therefore I might work,
And, being but poor, I was constrained, for life,
To work with one hand for the booksellers,
While working with the other for myself
And art. You swim with feet as well as hands,
Or make small way. I apprehended this,—
In England, so one lives by verse that lives;
And, apprehending, I resolved by prose
To make a space to sphere my living verse.
But her love for art resents the idea of mere writing for bread.
What you do
For bread, will taste of common grain, not grapes,
Although you have a vineyard in Champagne,—
Much less in Nephelcoccygia,
As mine was, peradventure.
Having bread
For just so many days, just breathing room
For body and verse, I stood up straight and worked
My veritable work. And as the soul
Which grows within a child, makes a child grow,—
Or as the fiery sap, the touch from God,
Careering through a tree, dilates the bark,
And roughs with scale and knob, before it strikes
The summer foliage out in a green flame—
So life, in deepening with me, deepened all
The course I took, the work I did. Indeed,
The academic law convinced of sin;
The critics cried out on the falling off,
Regretting the first manner. But I felt
My heart’s life throbbing in my verse to show
It lived, it also—certes incomplete,
Disordered with all Adam in the blood,
But even its very tumours, warts, and wens,
Still organised by, and implying life.
While at her work in London she becomes acquainted with the fact of Romney’s engagement to Marian Erle. She visits the girl and hears her story, which is told with a degree of passionate power which has never been surpassed in modern poetry. She consents to be present at the marriage. The day arrives:
Half St. Giles in frieze
Was bidden to meet St. James in cloth of gold,
And, after contract at the altar, pass
To eat a marriage-feast on Hampstead-heath.
Of course the people came in uncompelled,
Lame, blind, and worse—sick, sorrowful, and worse,
The humours of the peccant social wound
All pressed out, poured out upon Pimlico,
Exasperating the unaccustomed air
With hideous interfusion: you’d suppose
A finished generation, dead of plague,
Swept outward from their graves into the sun.
The moil of death upon them. What a sight!
A holiday of miserable men
Is sadder than a burial-day of kings.
They clogged the streets, they oozed into the church
In a dark slow stream, like blood. To see that sight,
The noble ladies stood up in their pews,
Some pale for fear, a few as red for hate,
Some simply curious, some just insolent,
And some in wondering scorn,—“What next? what next?”
These crushed their delicate rose-lips from the smile
That misbecame them in a holy place,
With broidered hems of perfumed han[d]kerchiefs;
Those passed the salts with confidence of eyes
And simultaneous shiver of moiré silk;
While all the aisles, alive and black with heads,
Crawled slowly toward the altar from the street,
As bruised snakes crawl and hiss out of a hole
With shuddering involution, swaying slow
From right to left, and then from left to right,
In pants and pauses. What an ugly crest
Of faces rose upon you everywhere
From that crammed mass! you did not usually
See faces like them in the open day:
They hide in cellars, not to make you mad
As Romney Leigh is.—Faces!—O my God,
We call those faces? men’s and women’s .. ay.
And children’s—babies, hanging like a rag
Forgotten on their mother’s neck,—poor mouths,
Wiped clean of mother’s milk by mother’s blow,
Before they are taught her cursing. Faces! .. phew,
We’ll call them vices festering to despairs,
Or sorrows petrifying to vices: not
A finger touch of God left whole on them;
All ruined, lost—the countenance worn out
As the garments, the will dissolute as the acts.
The passions loose and draggling in the dirt
To trip the foot up at the first free step!—
Those, faces! ’twas as if you had stirred up hell
To heave its lowest dreg-fiends uppermost
In fiery swirls of slime,—such strangled fronts,
Such obdurate jaws were thrown up constantly,
To twit you with your race, corrupt your blood,
And grind to devilish colours all your dreams
Henceforth, .. though, haply, you should drop asleep
By clink of silver waters, in a muse
On Raffael’s mild Madonna of the Bird.
The marriage is interrupted, as we have described, and Aurora returns to her labours. The description of her life at this period, of her hopes, her fears, her joys, her sorrows, is elaborate to the highest degree. It contains also some profound thoughts on art expressed in language glowing, rapid, and powerful as newly launched thunder-bolts.
Long green days,
Worn bare of grass and sunshine,—long calm nights,
From which the silken sleeps were fretted out,—
Be witness for me, with no amateur’s
Irreverent haste and busy idleness
I’ve set myself to art! What then? what’s done?
What’s done, at last?
Behold, at last, a book.
If life-blood’s necesssary,—which it is,
(By that blue vein athrob on Mahomet’s brow,
Each prophet-poet’s book must show man’s blood!)
If life blood’s fertilising, I wrung mine
On every leaf of this,—unless the drops
Slid heavily on one side and left it dry.
That chances often: many a fervid man
Writes books as cold and flat as grave-yard stones
From which the lichen’s scraped; and if St. Preux
Had written his own letters, as he might,
We had never wept to think of the little mole
’Neath Julia’s drooping eyelid. Passion is
But something suffered, after all.
While Art
Sets action on the top of suffering:
The artist’s part is both to be and do,
Transfixing, with a special, central power
The flat experience of the common man,
And turning outward, with a sudden wrench,
Half agony, half ecstasy, the thing
He feels the inmost: never felt the less
Because he sings it. Does a torch less burn
For burning next reflectors of blue steel,
That he should be the colder for his place
’Twixt two incessant fires,—his personal life’s,
And that intense refraction which burns back
Perpetually against him from the round
Of crystal conscience he was born into
If artist-born? O sorrowful great gift
Conferred on poets, of a twofold life,
When one life has been found enough for pain!
We, staggering ’neath our burden as mere men,
Being called to stand up straight as demi-gods,
Support the intolerable strain and stress
Of the universal, and send clearly up
With voices broken by the human sob,
Our poems to find rhymes among the stars!
We hurry past the description, filled with brilliant sarcasm, of the evening party where she hears the report of the approaching marriage of Romney, of her departure for her Italy, her meeting with Marian in Paris, her flight to Italy, and take up the story with her arrival in that country. She endeavours to find pleasure in some of her old habits, but in vain. How distinct are the separate descriptions in the following passage. How vividly do the words paint each object. How pathetic is the conclusion.
I took up the old days
With all their Tuscan pleasures, worn and spoiled,—
Like some lost book we dropt in the long grass
On such a happy summer-afternoon
When last we read it with a loving friend,
And find in autumn, when the friend is gone,
The grass cut short, the weather changed, too late,
And stare at, as at something wonderful
For sorrow,—thinking how two hands, before,
Had held up what is left to only one,
And how we smiled when such a vehement nail
Impressed the tiny dint here, which presents
This verse in fire for ever! Tenderly
And mournfully I lived. I knew the birds
And insects,—which looked fathered by the flowers
And emulous of their hues: I recognised
The moths, with that great overpoise of wings
Which makes a mystery of them how at all
They can stop flying: butterflies, that bear
Upon their blue wings such red embers round,
They seem to scorch the blue air into holes
Each flight they take: and fire-flies that suspire
In short lapses of transported flame
Across the tingling Dark, while overhead
The constant and inviolable stars
Outburn those lights-of-love: melodious owls,
(If music had but one note and was sad,
’Twould sound just so) and all the silent swirl
Of bats, that seem to follow in the air
Some grand circumference of a shadowy dome
To which we are blind: and then, the nightingales,
Which pluck our heart across a garden-wall,
(When walking in the town) and carry it
So high into the bowery almond-trees,
We tremble and are afraid, and feel as if
The golden flood of moonlight unaware
Dissolved the pillars of the steady earth
And made it less substantial. And I knew
The harmless opal snakes, sad large-mouthed frogs,
(Those noisy vaunters of their shallow streams)
And lizards, the green lightnings of the wall,
Which, if you sit down still, nor sigh too loud,
Will flatter you and take you for a stone,
And flash familiarly about your feet
With such prodigious eyes in such small heads!——
I knew them, though they had somewhat dwindled from
My childish imagery,—and kept in mind
How last I sate among them equally,
In fellowship and mateship, as a child
Will bear him still toward insect, beast, and bird,
Before the Adam in him has foregone
All privilege of Eden,—making friends
And talk, with such a bird or such a goat,
And buying many a two-inch-wide rush-cage
To let out the caged cricket on a tree,
Saying, “Oh, my dear grillino, were you cramped?
And are you happy with the ilex-leaves?
And do you love me who have let you go?
Say yes in singing, and I’ll understand.”
But now the creatures all seemed farther off,
No longer mine, nor like me; only there,
A gulph between us. I could yearn indeed,
Like other rich men, for a drop of dew
To cool this heat,—a drop of the early dew,
The irrecoverable child innocence
(Before the heart took fire and withered life)
When childhood might pair equally with birds;
But now .. the birds were grown too proud for us!
Alas, the very sun forbids the dew.
And I, I had come back to an empty nest,
Which every bird’s too wise for.
She is gradually sinking under the weight of her woe, when, one evening as she is sitting alone in her tower looking dreamily down upon Florence, she is aroused from her state of torpor. Mark in the following passage the exquisite description of the coming on of night, the wild beauty of the fancy of the sea-king, the suddenness of the bells crashing into the deep silence, the truth of the picture of Florence, the abruptness of the pause—the appearance of him who has been unconsciously tyrannising over her thoughts—
The heavens were making room to hold the night,
The sevenfold heavens unfolding all their gates
To let the stars out slowly (prophesied
In close approaching advent, not discerned),
While still the cue-owls from the cypresses
Of the Poggio called and counted every pulse
Of the skyey palpitation. Gradually
The purple and transparent shadows slow
Had filled up the whole valley to the brim,
And flooded all the city, which you saw
As some drowned city in some enchanted sea,
Cut off from nature,—drawing you who gaze,
With passionate desire, to leap and plunge,
And find a sea-king with a voice of waves,
And treacherous soft eyes, and slippery locks
You cannot kiss but you shall bring away
Their salt upon your lips. The duomo bell
Strikes ten, as if it struck ten fathoms down,
So deep; and fifty churches answer it
The same, with fifty various instances.
Some gaslights tremble along squares and streets;
The Pitti’s palace-front is drawn in fire;
And, past the quays, Maria Novella’s Place,
In which the mystic obelisks stand up
Triangular, pyramidal, each based
On a single trine of brazen tortoises,
To guard that fair church. Buonarroti’s Bride,
That stares out from her large blind dial eyes,
Her quadrant and armillary dials, black
With rhythms of many suns and moons, in vain
Enquiry for so rich a soul as his,—
Methinks I have plunged, I see it all so clear....
And, oh my heart, .... the sea-king!
In my ears
The sound of waters. There he stood, my king!
I felt him, rather than beheld him. Up
I rose, as if he were my king indeed,
And then sate down, in trouble at myself,
And struggling for my woman’s empery.
’Tis pitiful: but women are so made:
We’ll die for you, perhaps,—’tis probable:—
But we’ll not spare you an inch of our full height:
We’ll have our whole just stature,—five feet four,
Though laid out in our coffins: pitiful!
After some mutual misunderstanding, everything is finally explained. Aurora confesses her love with an indemnity of passionate grandeur of which words can give no idea. The passage is too long for quotation, and would appear harsh if severed from the context which prepares you for its lofty beauty. The whole of the concluding portion of the book is pitched in a key that would be too high to be musical, unless the ear had been gradually prepared by gradations. It is like the grand harmonic thunder which concludes a great overture, which is only intelligible as the culmination of ascending platforms of sound. We can only make room for a few of the passages which succeed her confession:
Could I see his face,
I wept so? Did I drop against his breast,
Or did his arms constrain me? Were my cheeks
Hot, overflooded, with my tears, or his?
And which of our two large explosive hearts
So shook me? That, I know not. There were words
That broke in utterance .. melted, in the fire;
Embrace, that was convulsion, .. then a kiss ..
As long and silent as the ecstatic night,—
And deep, deep, shuddering breaths, which meant beyond
Whatever could be told by word or kiss.
But what he said .. I have written day by day,
With somewhat even writing. Did I think
That such a passionate rain would intercept
And dash this last page? What he said, indeed,
I fain would write it down here like the rest,
To keep it in my eyes as in my ears,
The heart’s sweet scripture, to be read at night
When weary, or at morning when afraid,
And lean my heaviest oath on when I swear
That, when all’s done, all tried, all counted here,
All great arts, and all good philosophies,—
This love just puts its hand out in a dream,
And straight outreaches all things.
What he said,
I fain would write. But if an angel spoke
In thunder, should we, haply, know much more
Than that it thundered? If a cloud came down
And wrapt us wholly, could we draw its shape,
As if on the outside, and not overcome?
And so he spake. His breath against my face
Confused his words, yet made them more intense,—
As when the sudden finger of the wind
Will wipe a row of single city-lamps
To a pure white line of flame, more luminous
Because of obliteration; more intense,—
The intimate presence carrying in itself
Complete communication, as with souls
Who, having put the body off, perceive
Through simply being. Thus, ’twas granted me
To know he loved me to the depth and height
Of such large natures, ever competent
With grand horizons by the land or sea,
To love’s grand sunrise.
Although we have exceeded the limits we usually give to the notice of a poem, we have only touched upon a few of the prominent features of beauty with which this book abounds. We have been obliged to leave unnoticed some even of the most remarkable of these, as, for instance, the description of the French and of Paris. Her wise indignation at the flippancy with which ordinary persons dismiss the French from further notice by writing the whole nation “light,” is as admirable as the brilliancy of the terms in which it is expressed. But we must refer the reader to the book itself to satisfy himself that our praise is not even commensurate with its merits. We have spoken of Mrs. Browning’s imagination, of which the reader may form some idea by the extracts we have given. Her learning is equally remarkable. Not that learning which consists in bare knowledge, and when used comes out in the shape of pedantry, but that which adds vitality to conceptions and force to expressions, which is taken into the mind and is worked up into its being. Observe how beautifully and naturally the Greek history and mythology lights up such passages as these. Speaking of her father’s conduct on the death of her mother, Aurora says:
After which,
He left our Florence, and made haste to hide
Himself, his prattling child, and silent grief,
Among the mountains above Pelago!
Because unmothered babes, he thought, had need
Of mother nature more than others use,
And Pan’s white goats, with udders warm and full
Of mystic contemplations, come to feed
Poor milkless lips of orphans like his own—
Such scholar-scraps he talked, I’ve heard from friends,
For even prosaic men, who wear grief long,
Will get to wear it as a hat aside
With a flower stuck in’t.
Thus, my father gave;
And thus, as did the women formerly
By young Achilles, when they pinned the veil
Across the boy’s audacious front, and swept
With tuneful laughs the silver-fretted rocks,
He wrapt his little daughter in his large
Man’s doublet, careless did it fit or no.
O life, O poetry,
—Which means life in life! cognisant of life
Beyond this blood-best—passionate for truth
Beyond these senses,—poetry, my life,—
My eagle, with both grappling feet still hot
From Zeus’s thunder, who has ravished me
Away from all the shepherds, sheep, and dogs,
And set me in the Olympian roar and round
Of luminous faces, for a cup-bearer,
To keep the mouths of all the godheads moist
For everlasting laughters,—I, myself,
Half drunk across the beaker, with their eyes!
How those gods look!
Enough so, Ganymede,
We shall not bear above a round or two—
We drop the golden cup at Heré’s foot
And swoon back to the earth,—and find ourselves
Face-down among the pine cones, cold with dew,
While the dogs bark, and many a shepherd scoffs,
“What’s come now to the youth?” Such ups and downs
Have poets.
Earth, shut up
By Adam, like a fakir in a box
Left too long buried, remained stiff and dry,
A mere dumb corpse, till Christ the Lord came down,
Unlocked the doors, forced open the black eyes,
And used his kingly chrisms to straighten out
The leathery tongue turned back into the throat:
Since when, she lives, remembers, palpitates
In every limb, aspires in every breath,
Embraces infinite relations. Now,
We want no half-gods, Panomphæan Joves,
Fauns, Naiads, Tritons, Oreads, and the rest
To take possession of a senseless world
To unnatural vampire user.
We leave this work with no increased reverence for the authoress’s powers, for we never doubted them, but with a fuller confidence than ever in the early recognition by her countrymen and country-women of her place amongst those whose genius has rendered their names immortal.
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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