E620400A. Poems (1862).
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, April 1862, pp. 449–451.
Listed in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 30, 368.
[The article containing this review begins with notices of works by Thomas Rymer Jones, Max Müller, Philip Henry Gosse, Elizabeth Linton (|née| Lynn), and Thomas Wright; these we omit.]
Is it fancy, is it reality? The low vaporous weight of darkness has passed away, and the sweet heavens are once more smiling with mysterious serenity upon the bright and glittering meadow lands and hedges. The birds are twittering. The face of Nature is once more radiant and happy. We have been reading Mrs. Browning’s Poems, in the charming new edition, and [p. 450→] they have changed the aspect of the world to us. That deep and sensitive, that loving and thoughtful spirit, so lately taken from us, but whose utterances remain with us for evermore, will not have lived and suffered in vain, since so much of its experience has been put forth in cadences of melancholy music. She lived a dreamy solitary life, a prisoner in the sick-chamber, till Love came to create new life within her, and draw her once more, out into the world, where, as wife, mother, friend, and poet, she blessed the few, instructed and delighted the many, made England proud of her, and Italy eager to do grateful homage to her memory.* In these volumes may be read some of the episodes in that history: the sadness without some of the far-off sunshine of hope, the joy never without a feeling of mortality. Hear how the prisoner sings on her sick couch:—
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*The people of Florence have placed a tablet to her memory on the Casa Guidi, where she resided, and from whose “windows” she looked with such enthusiasm on the first outbreak of Italian freedom, and with such bitter grief at its first defeat.
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I count the dismal time by months and years
Since last I felt the greensward under foot,
And the great breath of all things summer-mute
Met mine upon my lips. Now earth appears
As strange to me as dreams of distant spheres,
Or thoughts of heaven we weep at. Nature’s lute
Sounds on, behind this door so closely shut,
A strange wild music to the prisoner’s ears,
Dilated by the distance, till the brain
Grows dim with fancies which it feels too fine;
While ever, with a visionary pain,
Past the precluded senses, sweep and shine
Streams, forests, glades, and many a golden train
Of sunlit hills transfigured to Divine.
Then, again, what a drama is unfolded in these exquisite love-poems, veiled with intelligible modesty under the title of “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” though no poet in Portugal ever sounded such passionate and thoughtful notes. How instinct with life, and real, not feigned, emotion they are! even a subject so commonplace as the giving a lock of hair can become thus immortalised:—
I never gave a lock of hair away
To a man, dearest, except this to thee,
Which now upon my fingers thoughtfully
I ring out to the full brown length, and say,
“Take it.” My day of youth went yesterday;
My hair no longer bounds to my foot’s glee,
Nor plant I it from rose or myrtle tree,
As girls do, any more; it only may
Now shade on two pale cheeks the mark of tears,
Taught drooping from the head that hangs aside
Through sorrow’s trick. I thought the funeral-shears
Would take this first, but Love is justified—
Take it thou—finding pure, from all those years,
The kiss my mother left here when she died.
Love-letters, again—old letters, read in after years—can thus move the chords:—
My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!
And yet they seem alive and quivering
Against my tremulous hands, which loose the string,
And let them drop down on my knee tonight.
This said—he wished to have me in his sight
Once, as a friend; this fixed a day in spring
To come and touch my hand … a simple thing,
Yet I wept for it!—this … the paper’s light …
Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed
As if God’s future thundered on my past.
This said, I am thine—and so its ink has paled
With lying at my heart that beat too fast.
And this … O Love, thy words have ill availed,
If what this said I dared repeat at last!
One more of these sonnets we must select, and it shall be that on the three kisses:—
First time he kissed me, but he only kissed
The fingers of this hand wherewith I write; [p. 451→]
And ever since it grew more clean and white,
Slow to world-greetings, quick with its “Oh list,”
When the angels speak. The second passed in height
The first, and sought the forehead, and half missed,
Half-falling on the hair. O beyond need!
That was the chrism of love, which love’s own crown,
With sanctifying sweetness, did precede.
The third upon my lips was folded down
In perfect, purple state; since when, indeed,
I have been proud and said, “My love, my own.”
It may seem idle to be thus quoting poems well known; but we who knew them, have been reading them again with fresh pleasure, and wish to make our readers sharers in it. This is no time for any critical estimate of Mrs Browning’s genius, nor for any enumeration of the many and obvious defects which accompanied, and sometimes marred, her magnificent gifts. Her place among the immortals is secure; her rank among them will be settled hereafter. One thing only we feel called upon to remark, and that is the beneficent effect which flows from her writings, in stirring the nobler emotions, and impressing her readers with high thoughts. The sense we have of the presence of a genuine and delicate womanhood, raised by genius and culture to the heights of modern thought, gives to the perusal a more serious pleasure and more penetrating and lasting benefit, than would be given by ten times the amount of talent, or a much more faultless taste. It is a soul speaking, not a talent: the verses are the musical expression of actual experience, not a trick of phrase, and solicitude for effect. The soul is imperfect, erring, but earnest; that of a sensitive, impressionable, saddened, but loving woman. Its experience has not been manifold, but intense, and is recorded in sincerity.
Another remark we would make is on the essentially musical nature of her genius. She is emphatically a Singer; one in whom thought is so blended with and suffused by emotion, that it may be doubted whether she could have written anything but poetry. The music so resonant in her verse was first the music in her mind; and even the great abstractions which philosophy presented to her, became great emotions in passing through her soul. This may explain her affluence; she sang as the birds sing, pouring forth “strains of unpremeditated art,” even when her poetic ambition made her most thoughtful of art. Now this quality, at any high power, is extremely rare. Men and women can be found, in abundance, who have exquisite sensibility, and others who have intellectual activity; but the union of the emotional and intellectual, both at a high degree, yet neither stifling the other, each intensifying each, is rarely found. It is from this cause that in all ages the Singers have been rare. In no previous age has such a singer been found among women. Mrs. Browning will be variously criticised, and cannot escape censure on many subordinate points; but the final result will still leave her immovable on her high pedestal, and will leave her poems a real boon to her generation.
[George Henry Lewes]
Reviewed:
Poems (EBB), 5th ed., London: Chapman & Hall, 1862.
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