E561217A. Poems (New York, 1857).
The Independent (New York), 17 December 1856, p. 8.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 23, 323.
Mr. Francis has put Mrs. Browning’s poetry in the present edition into the pleasant little pocket-size, and has clothed it in the fashionable blue-and-gold. We trust a multitude of readers, and of purchasers, may reward him for his enterprise. And yet one must be pardoned a slight sense of disharmony in seeing the Drama of Exile, Casa Guidi Windows, or above all Aurora Leigh, compressed into such narrow limits. It is easier to associate the magnificent thought, and the affluent on-flowing verse of Aurora, with the ample page, the copious margin, the broad uncurbed expanse of letter-press. It seems, at first sight, as if the redundant wealth of the poem, its glorious exuberance and queenly amplitude of portraiture and experience, must be somehow compressed, and painfully restricted, on these small pages; as if the passionate out-reaching genius that works and lives in it must rebel against such exactness of limitation, and by its own aspiring force must swell the fair-faced miniature volume into an octavo.
As we have not heard, however, of any such palpable and extraordinary demonstration of the innate supremacy of thought over matter, we presume these attractive and charming little books will lie quietly on the tables, or in the work-baskets or pockets, of those who shall purchase them. And as it is mainly the margin that is compressed, the imprint remaining substantially as it was in the previous editions from Mr. Francis’ elegant press, we can safely as well as gladly commend them to our readers. Whoever reads Mrs. Browning, with a mind and heart at all in sympathy with those uttered in her poetry, has sources of pleasure and means of culture always open with an inward consciousness of attainment and of freedom, which those who have them not may almost lawfully envy. It is to the credit of Americans that her writings, with all their marked peculiarities of idiom, have achieved here so prompt and so wide a popularity.
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), 3 vols. (16mo.), New York: C.S. Francis, 1857.
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