E571212A. Poems, (Pocket Edition, New York, 1857).
The Boston Daily Courier, 12 December 1857, p. 2.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 367.
We are glad to receive in this compact and tasteful form—in shape to be packed into carpet-bags and stuck into pockets—the poems of that wonderful woman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the greatest genius in our humble judgment, that has yet appeared on this earth in female form. What an amount of matter is compressed into these three little books, which, on wings of azure, bedropped with gold, flit forth from the publishers’ counter! what originality of intellectual construction! what power of passion! what experience of suffering! what depth and tenderness of feeling! what glorious pictures! what exquisite illustrations! Most women write poetry for women and children, but Mrs. Browning writes all like a man, and a woman too. There is nothing that a man’s mind ever thought—nothing that a man’s heart ever felt—which is not imaged and reproduced in her poetry. There is no man alive who can venture to look at the great mystery of life from a higher point of view than Mrs. Browning,—and certainly no one who has pierced more deeply into its core and essence. The truth, the range, the sweep of her mind are as remarkable as its lyric rapture or impassioned tenderness. She is sometimes an airy vision, bathing in the colors of sunset, and feeding on the perfume of flowers; and sometimes a statesman, a philanthropist, a philosopher, grappling with the most solemn problems of the hard world around us, and darting on the lightning of inspiration to the true solution. “The Italian question” is nowhere better discussed than in her “Casa Guidi Windows,” for instance. The third volume of this edition is occupied with that wonderful poem, “Aurora Leigh,” on the whole, the “bright, consummate flower” of Mrs. Browning’s genius, and the ripest, deepest, and most comprehensive product of her mind. There are specks in this poem, just as there are spots on the sun; but it will ever stand as the most complete abstract in an imaginative form of the age that is around us: awakening an admiration in exact proportion to the depth of the reader’s comprehension and the variety of his experience. We wish that the publishers would strike off an edition of this poem separately, in the attractive and portable form here presented.
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), 3 vols. (32mo., blue & gold), New York: C.S. Francis, 1857.
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