Reviews

E600324D.  Poems Before Congress.

The Examiner, 24 March 1860, p. 181.

As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 27, 364.

Mrs Browning dreams of a day when there shall arise an English statesman with a heart too large for England, and the praise of England shall be not so much from her own sons as from the populations she has saved. But now the Emperor, who alone fights for an idea, is perhaps, with as much reason as rhyme, glorious to her as

Emperor

Evermore.

“Emperor(e) Evermore,” is the burden of the first hymn in her little volume, and the close of the book is a curse upon this nation that drew no sword for Italy, because for us as we now are—

A curse from the depths of womanhood

Is very salt, and bitter, and good.

Selfish England having received better gifts than the present work from Mrs Browning, takes her friendly malediction in good part, admires the few vigorous thoughts scattered through the volume, and desires to see her freedom of song subject to no fetters but those it has too long disdained, of rhyme. In proportion to her earnestness seems to be Mrs Browning’s scorn of that orthodoxy in the formation of rhymes to which submission has been made by every serious poet in our language really able, as Mrs Browning is, to put high thought into enduring words. It is one thing to abandon rhyming as below the dignity of earnest minds, another to adopt it and to use it ill. We at least do not reckon it a merit that ‘in ore Graio Scythicus apparet rigor.’ Bad rhymes in verse are very much like an impediment in speech; and is there to be stuttering upon the lips of Plato? Passion and domination, beauties and a foot is, Modena and God in a, schooner and oppugn or, vice on and suspicion, are examples of a way of rhyming surely not below correction in a writer who, whatever the present misdirection of her earnestness, contributes to the literature of her country.

Reviewed:

Poems Before Congress (EBB), London: Chapman & Hall, 1860.

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