E570700A. Aurora Leigh.
The Month: A Literary and Critical Journal (Sydney), July 1857, pp. 17–18.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 348.
The first book that challenges attention is Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem-story of “Aurora Leigh.” Several editions of the work, although published but a short time, have appeared in England,—still, such is the inactivity of our colonial publishers, that we have been unable to obtain the poem for review. We must, therefore, postpone our notice, until a stray copy shall, by the kindness of some one of our readers, alight on our table. (N.B.—The Editor of the Month neither marks nor cuts a book.) We have, however, been enabled to gather from a London contemporary the following passages:—
If he had loved,
Ay, loved me, with that retributive face, ..
I might have been a common woman now,
And happier, less known and less left alone;
Perhaps a better woman after all,—
With chubby children hanging on my neck
To keep me low and wise. Ah! me, the vines,
That bear such fruit are proud to stoop with it.
The palm stands upright in a realm of sand.
. . . . . .
A fool will pass for such through one mistake,
While a philosopher will pass for such,
Through said mistakes being ventured in the gross
And heaped up to a system.
. . . . . .
There are nettles everywhere,
But smooth green grasses are more common still:
The blue of heaven is larger than the cloud.
. . . . . .
That makes libertines;
That slurs our cruel streets from end to end
With eighty thousand women in one smile,
Who only smile at night beneath the gas:
The body’s satisfaction and no more.
Being used for argument against the soul’s.
. . . . . .
He, the man, appeared
So pale and patient, like the marble man
A sculptor puts his personal sadness in
To join his grandeur of ideal thought.
Here is a delicious progressive piece of painting:
italy from the sea.
That night we spent between the purple heaven
And purple water: I think Marian slept; [p. 18→]
But I, as a dog a-watch for his master’s foot,
Who cannot sleep or eat before he hears,
I sat upon the deck and watched all night,
And listened through the stars for Italy.
. . . . . .
I felt the wind from the soft land of souls;
The old miraculous mountains heaved in sight,
One straining past another along the shore,
The way of grand dull Odyssean ghosts,
Athirst to drink the cold blue wine of seas
And stare on voyagers. Peak pushing peak
They stood: I watched beyond that Tyrian belt
Of intense sea betwixt them and the ship;
Down all their sides the misty olive-woods
Dissolving in the weak congenial moon,
And still disclosing some brown convent-tower,
That seems as if it grew from some brown rock,—
Or many a little lighted village, dropt
Like a fallen star, upon so high a point,
You wonder what can keep it in its place
From sliding headlong with the waterfalls
Which drop, and powder all the myrtle-groves
With spray of silver. Thus my Italy
Was stealing on us. Genoa broke with day;
The Doria’s long pale palace striking out,
From green hills in advance of the white town,
A marble finger dominant to ships,
Seen glimmering through the uncertain grey of dawn.
Mrs. Browning’s reputation as a poetess had long ago entitled her to claim kindred with Tennyson, Taylor, and her own husband: and unless we are much mistaken with regard to the merits of “Aurora Leigh,” it has precipitated her fame somewhat a-head of all her brotherhood.
[The article containing this review continues with notices of works by Gerald Massey, John Stuart Blackie, and Charles Mackay; these we omit.]
[Frank Fowler]
Reviewed:
Aurora Leigh (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1857.
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